To be fair, it's pretty expensive breaking them into chunks and packaging them individually and they're turned pin ones by the looks. This isn't massive production run bags of them.
Anecdote. I had a 2011 MBP with backlit keyboard. Never used it once. In fact, the machine ended up with windows on it because MacOS made me want to smash the thing (despite being a Unix guy) and the Boot Camp drivers didn't switch the backlight off reliably which annoyed the crap out of me.
If you're sitting in a place dark enough to need it, it's not good for you staring at the contrast between the screen and darkness so turn the light on.
Or just buy an older ThinkPad X201 / X220 / T410 with 1440x900 display and get a new 9-cell battery.
The things are really cheap, have a proper keyboard, are bomb proof, every part is replaceable for minimal cost, they are 100% supported by all operating systems, have excellent docking support and you can just sling them in your bag. Mine lives down the back of the sofa cushions when not in use.
I knackered the headphone port on mine from overuse. 5 mins on ebay, £7 spent, new board installed in 5 mins with a Philips screwdriver and the service manual.
For every day tasks, I use an i5 X201 with 8Gb of RAM and a Samsung 840 Pro and it's no different to the stacked HP Z620 I have in the office to use. If I need more power then I use that remotely.
Totally awesome machine and I paid virtually nothing for it.
PC tech is moving so slowly now it's a better investment to buy two older machines so you have a backup unit than one new one if you ask me.
Whilst not quite PDP11/VAX territory (I do love VAXstations though!), the killer for me was I bought a low end Sun Ultra 30 in 1999 just before they EOL'ed them and spent 3 years slowly upgrading it. Spent about 4000 GBP on it in total.
Still felt faster then than the i5 X201 ThinkPad on my lap today. Everything was smooth as butter, even though it was Solaris 2.6.
This is not hard work. I'm not sure exactly what was being done that made this take more than an hour.
On our kit, which is pretty hefty, I'd schedule a 30 minute window for a 150Gb ETL even with heavy transformations.
When we moved our stuff from Mongo to SQL Server it took an entire 6 minutes to drag 30Gb over including SQL full text. That was a 16 core Xeon with 64Gb of RAM and 15K SAS RAID 10 so not a big machine either.
Very good points there. I worked for an aerospace and defence company for a bit as an electrical engineer. Our software was always read into RAM, checksummed, the RAM was write protected via a register and only then the code was executed. The bootloader was a mask ROM. That was all just to work around the possibility of bit flips in EPROMs.
This. I've had several smartphone devices over the years and not one has been bent in my pocket, even when I sit on it. I don't expect it to happen, even on a premium device.
Not the only one. Someone set up NHibernate on a project I was working on to run logging in DEBUG mode and throw it in a log file capped at 100k. Pages were taking 4-5 seconds to render. Wasn't obvious that the logs were being written as the file was capped at 100k.
Decent quality hard disks and DLTs will probably be fine. I've had DLTs survive 100oC for over an hour inside a fire safe in a fire and some old Seagate Cheetah 10K U160 SCSI disks in an external SCSI case with a dead fan running at 80oC for a month quite happily. The latter was actually running and operational which is remarkable.
Some optical media will fail. It doesn't even have to be kept at 75oC from experience.
Flash will almost certainly fail (leakage increases with temperature). I've had dead CF cards, USB sticks, SD cards, the lot and corruption after only a couple of years stored in ideal conditions. Then there's the old Sun PROM crapfest to consider as well...
These are all anecdotes, but there is data out there to support this as well.
I still use a Quantum VS160 DLT to back up my SSD...
The thing plugs straight into my laptop via no brand cheapo SCSI/USB bridge much to the laughing from my colleagues (apart from the ops team who understand why I do it).
Being an ex EE, I understand exactly how "transient" the state of an SSD is.
We also have deeply layered non-hetereogenous kit so you have to punch hard to get through it all to something useful.