Too bad this company stopped doing consumer products like BeyondTV. I wonder what are good ones these days.

That is what older generations always say about the younger generations. :/

I assumed more battery life without checking because chromebook, I guess the macbook air or high end ultra book are close, but 13 inch breaks downsize barrier?

You should treat EVERY drive as suspect and about to fail. Whether it spins or is solid state.

If your windows 7 install is taking almost 5 minutes to boot, there's a problem, and it isn't because it is on a spinning disk.

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.