This does not seem to be true across all manufacturers. I dismantle all of our drives before disposal, and I've only come across glass platters in laptop drives (they seem to have been glass all the way back to the early 1990s, the earliest one I disassembled was from 1992 and had glass platters). All of the 3.5" drives have had aluminum platters, from the cheap 5400 RPM drives to 10000 RPM drives from servers.

It's possible that some manufacturers use glass platters in certain model lines of drives, but there doesn't seem to be an industry-wide changeover to glass platters. I have a stack of aluminum platters here to prove it - the most recent from a drive manufactured in mid-2010.

I dismantle every drive that we are getting rid of, usually about five a year.

So far, the only glass platters have been in laptop drives. The most recent 3.5" drive was from 2010, and had aluminum platters. The laptop drives seem to have had glass platters all the way back to the early 1990s.

I would like to see someone travel on the ground from NYC to Paris. At some point during the journey, a car is going to lose traction due to the depth of the water in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Concorde tickets cost three to ten times the price of a subsonic flight. To say that if someone can afford a $1000 subsonic flight, then they can also afford a $10,000 supersonic flight is just silly.

I'm not sure where you live, but in the USA the 55 MPH limit is largely gone. I've been flying on jet aircraft since the mid 1970s (at similar speeds to today's air transport), and so have millions of others, so I'm not sure what your point is. Somehow losing the peak travel speeds of a small number of travels whilst not raising the travel speeds of the masses raises the average travel speed?

Sony is a Japanese company, not American. Of all of Sony's business units, Sony Computer Entertainment America would be an unlikely choice to go after someone in China. It's entirely possible that Sony has a division located somewhere in Asia - that division might try to get the Japanese and Chinese governments involved, but it's not clear why you'd think America would be involved. Maybe you got your wires crossed a little.

Yeah, right. I think you may be in a strange mental state where you're dreaming, but you're still able to interact with the real world. Try pinching yourself to see if you wake up.

Wait a minute - you're comparing wanting to use product features that were advertised by the manufacturer and then taken away, to something that is specifically prohibited by Federal law?

Shotguns are not advertised as having the feature of being able to saw off the barrels to a shorter length. Many people do saw off the barrels to the legal length, but no shotgun manufacturer advertises this as a selling point, regardless of how useful it might be.

Sony advertised that the PS3 product could both run "Other Operating Systems" such as linux, and it could also use the PlayStation Network. Those are both useful features, and they are not violations of Federal law (which your shotgun example would be).

They then updated the software on the product (PS3) such that you could either choose to retain the Other OS functionality, or the PSN functionality, but not both. That is stealing, or if it's not, it's at least the intentional introduction of a defect into the product. Customers should either retain all the advertised functionality of the product, or be compensated for the loss of that functionality.

Here's a car analogy:

You buy a new Toyota Boringmobile. It gets cold where you live, so you buy it based on Toyota advertising that it has heated seats. They also advertise that is has the ability to safely transport you and your family from place to place. Those are two advertised features: 1. Safe transportation, 2. heated seats.

You pay money for the car. Toyota gives you title to, and possession of, the car. You drive it home. You are happy.

Toyota sends you a notice: "Bring your Boringmobile into any Toyota dealership for a free service to make sure it continues to fulfill it's promise of safe (if rather dull) transportation". There's a recall on the tires or something like that.

You visit your Toyota dealership, and they replace the tires with new ones which work exactly like the old ones, but you needed to do that for safety's sake - Toyota's notice to you more or less said so. At the same time, Toyota disables the heated seats.

Wait a minute! You paid for heated seats! But they don't work any more. Toyota says "Well, you agreed to that in the terms of service - it was on page 38 of the agreement you agreed to by driving to the dealership"

But wait a minute, contract law doesn't work like that - they can't take features back without compensating you (Generally in a contract, "consideration" i.e. money, has to change hands in exchange for taking or providing goods and/or services). You take Toyota to court (most likely as part of a class action), and get either money or your heated seat functionality back.

What has happened here is that Sony has stolen functionality from the owners of a physical product that was bought and paid for.

The proper shotgun analogy is that you had a double-barreled shotgun and you could shoot both barrels, or just use them to store two shotgun rounds if you chose to never fire the shotgun. After an update, your Sony shotgun will now only fire the first barrel. The second barrel is now just for storing a spare round. Don't like that your gun doesn't work as advertised any more? Sorry, it had to be done so that you could continue to use Sony ammunition. Except that it didn't, did it?

I read both articles; they describe the same machine, and both articles point to the same website, www.commodoreusa.net

It's the same damn thing.

Of course, if you'd read and understood both articles, you'd know that, so I guess I shouldn't expect too much...

Covered a while back, here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/0625211/Commodore-64-Primed-For-a-Comeback-In-June.

It's just another article covering the same machine discussed previously.

Wow.

You know, you can watch many commercials on Youtube.

Actually the electronic throttles are more reliable than cables. Cables have been known to snap, or have the ends come off (which is basically the same thing.)

As to responsiveness, you probably should have bought a car designed for that, rather than the automotive equivalent of a washing machine. My car has an electronic throttle, and I'm sometimes surprised how responsive it is, but it's not a boring transportation appliance like a Toyota. Toyotas are very reliable, but also reliably boring.

The separation of the control mechanism from the actual throttle valve also allows the carmaker to engineer the feel of the pedal, and do smart things like close the throttle for traction control and blip the throttle open slightly for downshifts. Brake override so that the throttle won't open if you're pressing on the brake pedal (or have the parking brake engaged) is possible too. Neither of those things can be done with a mechanical linkage or cable - the engine controls would have been limited to tricks like reducing power by retarding the ignition timing.

The Bose system was electrohydraulic. Pretty much all of the active suspensions systems have been electrohydraulic.

Well, since it actually says:

It sounds like the author was just trying to make the article more sensational.

That's not how it works at all.

You want some helicopter parts thrown in? The military guys know to not even try that. That's not what happens at all. Everyone is covering their asses. If some military helicopter part fails, you can bet that the procurement chain will be examined. There has to be a paper trail for everything.

Supplier says "pay us $20k for your crazy over-spec'ed* hammer, and we'll jump through your stupid purchasing hoops, go through all kinds of extra work certifying things that have nothing to do with the performance of the item, fill out reams of unnecessary paperwork, send an employee to a special course so they can learn how to enter invoices in your arcane billing system (btw, commercial invoice ~1 page, government invoice ~30 pages), wait thirty days for our first billing to be rejected because of some minor issue (100% chance first billing is rejected, btw), submit corrected billing, wait 30 days for someone to tell us that the contract was shifted to another department and so it has to be resubmitted again (they knew 2 days after we billed them, but they're not required to respond until 30 days, so they don't), wait another 30 days to find that the billing was accepted, then wait 60 days for the payment to show up".

Many companies turn government business away, because the documentation requirements are onerous, the payment terms are ridiculous, and the project may be cancelled halfway through anyway.

*The requirements on military items would make your head spin. Making a tiny design change to a part to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture can trigger everything from having three government people sign off on the revised drawing all the way to having to run a live fire test at some proving ground where they strap your whatever it is to a tank and drive it around, attach it to whatever gun it's supposed to work with and fire 1000 rounds, or shoot at it, depending on what it is. All for a really minor change that was never going to affect how it worked in the first place.

You may think a $20k hammer is ridiculous, and it is, but once you see the paper and testing trail, it starts to look reasonable, assuming it's not an off-the-shelf-item (very few are). Now, if they're buying more than 10 hammers, that price had better come down, but for a one-off, $20k is a bargain. Heck, it'd probably win an award for cost savings.

No, collecting a paycheck from a government job whilst at the same time complaining that you're anti-government and anti-spending is called hypocrisy.

One car's motor overheated and basically shut down, "reduced power" was what Clarkson said when it happened. The other car's brakes failed.

Those are failures, regardless if they were temporary or not.

The problem is, Top Gear tests cars as though they are going to be driven on "track days" which are basically amateur racing where the cars are pushed hard for a long time - totally unlike the real-world road driving most people do. Most mass-market cars would suffer brake failures or other problems when used this way.

Frankly, given that Top Gear tests cars on their track the way they do, the review was pretty balanced. They showed that although the Tesla didn't handle quite as well as the Lotus that it's based on, it could out-accelerate the Lotus on the straights.

On almost every episode of Top Gear there is a multi-hundred-thousand dollar (up to millions of dollars) car sliding around the test track, being pushed to its limits in ways that no street driven car would be. The Tesla, like many cars, isn't built to take it. Would you be upset if your $2,000,000 Bugatti suffered the same problems? Yes. Would you even be surprised if a $20,000 Honda's engine overheated or brakes failed when driven that way for an extended time? No. The issue is that the "real world" Clarkson was talking about was on their track, not on public roads.

The Tesla is built to be a sporty car, but not a race car. There are some cars that can take abuse all day long and do just fine, and some that can't. There's nothing wrong with that. When I owned a Porsche I was able to drive the car very hard all day long and then drive it home as though nothing had happened. My V8 Camaro could beat the Porsche in a drag race (wouldn't come close on a corner though) but it would have ended up ruined given a day of the same treatment the Porsche took.

Top Gear has also driven a Prius around their track as fast as possible, with a V8 BMW M3 following it to prove that hybrids aren't the end-all of fuel economy (the BMW got far better gas mileage because the Prius was never designed to be driven on a track). The same type of driving is a recipe for using up 100% of an electric car's charge pretty quickly, and given that type of usage, the comments about recharge time are valid. But, if you just want to drive sedately to work and back, the Prius is going to get much better gas mileage than the M3.

Sending a "performance" car to Top Gear that isn't designed for the rigors of track use is guaranteed to result in a bad review. It's not like they're doing bland consumer reviews of family cars like PBS' Motor Week.

Sometime the Tesla guys should watch the review of the Bentley where one of the rear tires explodes, and think themselves lucky. Heck, the seats in one Mercedes-Benz (an AMG Black model) were compared unfavorably to a pile of rocks. You don't see M-B complaining.