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Why? That strikes me as pretty vindictive. My sister wasn't exactly on great terms when she split (i.e. she was seriously considering my offer to put her ex in a dumpster), but she still forwarded him his mail.

Don't they already do that on The Biggest Loser? :D

Backblaze has some interesting data on that. 5 years sounds like a reasonable number here. It would be interesting to know a similar ballpark figure for the archival life of SSDs. I know the data in 3D NAND decays more slowly because they're using larger cells. How long out can one expect...

Not too many really poor can afford cars. If being regressive concerns you, you could always have a refundable gas tax credit which gradually phases out as income increases. I was figuring we got through $4+ per gallon gas once, so we're not jacking the price to levels which never existed...

No such limitation. A heavier vehicle actually has more room and weight capacity for batteries than a lighter one. It has to do with basic physics. A good amount of a vehicle's energy is expended pushing air out of the way. A larger vehicle may have more frontal area, but a 40,000 pound bus...

The reason for choosing a lighter vehicle is often to save money. Gas may be temporarily cheap, but it's still expensive enough that a small vehicle will save someone a significant amount of money if they drive 10K or 20K miles per year compared to a hulking SUV. And some people, like my sister...

Agreed. Now especially with gas prices low this would be a great time to have a sane gas tax. Have a variable tax which keeps the price of gas at, say, $4 or $5 per gallon regardless of the actual price of oil. Increase this in 50 cent increments each year until you hit maybe $10 per gallon...

Exactly. I recall reading something a number of years ago where a woman was so thrilled her SUV saved her in a collision (at the expense of everyone in the car she hit) that she vowed to buy an even larger SUV next time. This borders on sociopathic.

Neither device is really suitable for archiving. The magnetic bits on an HDD decay also due to superparamagnetism. This wasn't an issue when drives were less dense. Indeed, a 20MB drive from the 1980s would probably still be readable in a century. I wouldn't bet on one of today's drives being...

Safer for the occupants doesn't translate into safer overall. Suppose hypothetically you have a collision between two vehicles of the same mass and 1 person dies in each vehicle. That's 2 deaths. Now let's say you do the same collision but one vehicle is much more massive. Nobody dies in vehicle...

Maybe I need to clarify things a bit. HDDs are inherently unreliable simply because they're mechanical devices. You can make reliability acceptable for relatively low cost. Let's call a 5-year median lifespan "acceptable" for the sake of argument. If you make them too cheap, they're unacceptably...

Some food for thought. ~10% of traffic deaths involve large trucks. Autonomous driving will be the single biggest safety feature ever once it's in use. At that point, crash protection is pretty much moot.

I live in NYC, home of the maniac driver. ;) Note here since we were talking about cities when we got on the topic of bikes and electric buses that buses and trains have plenty of shoulder room compared to any car. If someone doesn't care to ride a bike, then public transit is the second best...

See my TCO analysis in my last post. Also, no mention of a warranty. 3 years? 5 years? 1 year? Anything in that size with a 5-year warranty seems to cost $120 and up.

Well, I've little doubt battery tech will soon make range anxiety mostly moot. Add to this the development of on-the-fly recharging and the need for a small gas engine vanishes. Any particular reason you need a 5000 pound SUV? Carrying a lot of gear? Driving off-road a lot? If it's just you a...

Warranty periods went down to a year on a lot of the cheaper drives. Standard for consumer drives a few years back was 3 years. Enterprise SSDs are typically faster, not necessarily more robust. It's a fair comparison using enterprise HDDs and decent consumer SSDs like Samsung. Both have a...

Yep. I get it that buying automobiles is associated with prosperity and conspicuous consumption but really bikes work much better in cities. That includes large American and European cities as well.

Sort of how I feel but nowadays integrated graphics are fine for the vast majority of users. I would imagine if we designed cases and motherboards so the heat-generating components could be connected to a huge, passive heat sink on back of the case we wouldn't need fans.

You could try replacing the switch with something like this. I can see how this could be a problem if you and your machine are sitting in close proximity. My case actually has a recessed switch. I'm guessing you're not the only one who ever had this problem.

Fortunately it's looking more like it's just a blocked salivary gland which somehow became mildly infected. If it doesn't clear up on its own I'll make an appointment with my dentist. I've heard we're spraying mosquitoes here on account of the Zika virus. Don't know if it made its way this far...

If things got really bad I could call an ambulance. The fever actually dropped. I think I might have a blocked salivary gland. One of the home remedies, believe it or not, is sucking on lemons. Just don't call me a sour puss! ;) Sad to say, nobody. I'm running myself into the ground doing this...

Agreed. And eventually their EV cars will make it to our shores as well. China really has little choice here. Their cities make the air in places like LA look pristine. They need to move to electric vehicles in a big way, or face bankruptcy of their socialized health care system once large...

Are those things going to be reliable for those prices? I can believe we can make reliable 7200 RPM enterprise drives at high capacities for maybe $200 and up but I can't help but believe these $50 drives cut everything to the bone. They probably use components really only suitable for 5400 RPM...

Right. I've read some of the opinions singing the praises of 7200 RPM and they border on a Sunday sermon. One which really cracked me up is someone who said 7200 RPM drives are as fast as SSDs. Coug was right. It's like religion. People are stupid (not referring to you Coug but to average people...

Coug, Believe whatever it is you want to believe. I probably forgot more about electronics, reliability, and failure rates than you'll ever know. Just because 7200RPM seem to work OK for what you use them for at work doesn't prove anything except they're adequate for that particular task...

I have my important data on 2 SSDs, 1 HDD, and a few USB drives. I'd feel better though if I had it on something portable besides the USB drives. Long term a portable SSD is in my plans. It's only recently that SSDs in the 1 to 2 TB class have started to get semi-affordable. Remember until I...

I nearly passed out from the heat just bringing in the garbage pails. Walking around looking for a doctor is a non-starter. Can't leave my mom alone for that long anyway. I'll just have to deal with it as best I can. The swelling gets somewhat better if I don't eat.

I have terrible swelling on the left side of my face since dinner last night and a fever. I noticed a few mosquito bites the day before. I hope it's not Zika.

http://disq.us/p/18bpeih http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/ http://www.waterworld.com/articles/print/volume-24/issue-4/departments/pump-tips-techniques/operating-pumps-at-slower-speeds-increases-reliability.html...

I don't think hard drives were particularly reliable 30 years ago. They were a relatively new product. It took a while to get it right. I want to say hard drive reliability probably peaked before hard drives became commodity items, say in the late 1990s. However, reliability didn't degrade...

Congratulations Howell and Bozo! Not sure I'd make it with someone for 4 days, let alone 4 years or 45 years.

But if they standardize on 7200RPM those won't be available, correct? As it is the pickings for 5400 RPM are pretty slim if you stick to decent brand HDDs like HGST, Toshiba, or Samsung. Seagate and WD are crap as far as I'm concerned and Backblaze's tests seem to bear this out. I'll just wait...

The only reason to buy HDD over SSD nowadays is lower cost per TB. Much of that advantage disappears when you look at enterprise drives. And then if use RAID1 the price advantage gets cut in half. Using Coug's quote for the 10TB drive and buying a pair to use in RAID1 gives you $1320US for 10TB...

The main problem with high speeds is less reliability. Nothing I read would inspire much confidence in me to trust 10TB of data to 5 or 6 disks spinning at 120 times per second. It seems like drives are failing much more often than they used to because the HDD manufacturers are pushing the...

You could say the same thing about why car makers haven't made electric cars. Big, established companies often have an inertia to doing things differently. The car companies also have considerable investments in tooling for ICE vehicles, plus they get kickbacks from oil companies. Given both...

I agree with standardizing on one RPM to avoid having multiple product lines, but from where I stand we should be going to 5400 RPM or less, maybe even 3600 RPM, for power, noise, and reliability reasons. Large HDDs these days solely function as bulk storage where access times really don't...

Electric buses and trucks are potentially way more important than electric cars if we want to reduce the noise and pollution problems in large cities. And any autonomy which reduces the number of vehicles needed and/or parking is another bonus. We made a horrible mistake in the last 60 years...

Ouch! I didn't realize you had been married for that long. For what it's worth, my parents spent nearly 45 years in a bad marriage, basically the best years of their lives. My mom endured it for her children. We would have been in poverty otherwise. She went out on disability in her early 40s...

I could see what you described working fairly well during off-peak hours. However, in NYC at least, most buses on fixed routes are standing room only for much of the day, so probably not much efficiency to be gained by going to smaller vehicles for most of the day (i.e. 7AM through about 7 or 8...

I think this was the first time he mentioned it. I don't recall reading anything about him not being married until yesterday. I'm always sorry to see a potential union between two people not work out. On the bright side, at least no children are involved. Children always complicate a split. I...

The suburbs in general receive a massive amount of direct and indirect subsidies for roads over and above whatever portion of taxes their residents pay which goes for urban transportation. Also, in the context of bus service, the largest cost by far is labor, not the cost of the buses. An...

That's universally true in large cities. I typically even beat out buses on my bike late nights when there's little traffic. The bus needs to stop for passengers and red lights. I don't. Even if I only average 15 mph I'll often handily beat buses late nights. During the day it's no contest...

In the suburbs probably true. In large, dense cities we'll still use conventional buses on fixed routes simply because the street space doesn't exist to replace one bus with 50 or 75 autonomous vehicles going to different destinations. I've heard the idea of autonomous vehicles making mass...

NYC has already been using hybrid buses for at least the last 5 years. Electric buses are probably the next step once the charging infrastructure is in place. Buses often sit for 10 or 20 minutes at the end terminal. That might give enough time to replenish the charge lost in between terminals...

There is some value in cooking/cleaning. There may or may not be value in bringing over other girls, depending upon whether or not they're hooked up, addicts themselves, or attractive/unattractive. I hate to say this but I'm not so sure about that. Right now with my mother going through the...

The real problem here is if anything happens to her you may well end up with a child you don't want and are ill-equipped to take care of. Does she have family members who will take the child if anything happens to her? I understand why you want to help her. Indeed, if not for my parents letting...

That makes two of us. Should make for interesting reading.

I tend to think Putin would rather have Hillary as President. Trump with his America first rhetoric strikes me as someone who would have his finger on the nuclear button from day one.

I think we're still on a major learning curve. The raw materials for any kind of semiconductor are ridiculously inexpensive. The real cost is in the process. I have to think as we get better at it, yields will go up and the cost will come way down. The yields for 3D NAND are probably a closely...

I've heard there's no fundamental physical limit on vertical stacking. There might ultimately be a process limit. In any case, the next few years in storage should be interesting. Obviously cheap, bulk storage will be the last thing to go. HDDs will probably hit some fundamental limit on future...