farcical_tinpot

> Literally nothing about this sentence is correct.

Sorry, but literally everything about it is correct. What a great adjective.

> Support reps know nothing, and nameless support reps that throw out statements like that with no explanation

Errrrr, no. Support reps do not throw out incredible specific, crystal clear and precise statements like that unless they're true. This doesn't come out of nowhere.

>I can't believe I'm having to explain this on Hacker News.

Your working life must be pretty interesting if that's you're attitude to every crystal clear, unequivocal and precise statement you read ;-).

> no, it's not some bullshit conspiracy

No, it's not. An extremely clear statements has been made that is not open to misinterpretation.

> Plus, you know, you could read Matthew's blog post (the HN link that we're commenting on...) that explains this as well.

I have, and true to form, it doesn't. As usual we get someone who wants to tell us that black is white and that a manufacturer miraculously using buggy fake RAID drivers is now the done thing. For performance. Or power management. Or whatever the reason happens to be.

It would be awesome if you knew what you were talking about ;-).

There is no way that using a fake RAID set of drivers and a completely incompatible and more complex on-disk RAID format is going to increase performance in any way.

There's a reason why that hasn't been done on any system in the past - because it's stupid and fake RAID drivers are notoriously buggy and require support from cloning and other low level software that gets used.

Yer, you're not an expert, or appear to know anything about hardware.

The statement is there in black and white and it is as crystal clear and unequivocal as you can get.

> even Microsoft don't ship a driver that supports it.

.....and why do you suppose that is? Fake RAID drivers and hardware are shit that's why. It's an option that is hardly used, if ever, and I never thought I'd see the day when a system had it as its default.

Why not? They're always generally the most truthful.

Garrett has a history of stonewalling and misdirection on these matters. It was the same with UEFI, Secure Boot and when he and Red Hat tried to casually shoehorn support for PE binaries into the Linux kernel, hoping no one would notice.

> The idea that a single customer support representative would know something

When you work at a company you have a funny way of finding things out, and you don't say things on forums or elsewhere that you don't mean to say :-).

When somebody tells me something clearly and directly, and why, I tend to believe them. But I'm just funny like that.

It would run Windows though ;-).

Yay, so supporting completely non-standard and inevitably more buggy drivers is the correct option?

Because providing that option doesn't give anyone sub-par drivers?

Also, the power saving stuff is bollocks. I never thought I would see the day when anyone would recommend using a bullshit fake RAID driver for power saving reasons.

Every other chipset and motherboard in existence has had that option and it hasn't affected anyone adversely. There is no less of two evils. There isn't any evils here.

It's not Secure Boot - yet. But this is what you're going to find - obsolescence depending on built-in hardware driver support. Not only are you not getting Linux installed on here but Windows 7, or any future version of Windows that does not have this driver built for it. You'll then have to throw the hardware away.

No, it wasn't a bullshit statement from a rep - it was a very clear statement from a rep, in black and white, that has not been retracted or clarified by Lenovo in any way. It's always funny when people choose not to believe verbatim statements and explanations put right in front of them.

Correction, they only support on version of that OS - which is the point here.

To claim you're going to get better battery life with a fake RAID driver is also one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

Seeing a manufacturer use fake RAID, by default, on a single disk system, then unfathomably hardwiring this into the firmware so it can't be changed, then have a Lenovo rep actually admit the reason with the forum thread censored and then see this kind of defence is downright hilarious.

Garrett should be condemning Lenovo for not making a perfectly configurable chipset feature....configurable and defending Linux and freedom of choice on hardware that has always traditionally been that way. But, no, he doesn't. He defends stupidity as he always does.

So get a vanilla install disk from Microsoft's site, install and reuse the license.

Which won't work.

That should be you might be able to get an OS they're not keen on booted, of course.

....and indeed, there are only Windows 10 drivers.

http://support.lenovo.com/gb/en/products/Laptops-and-netbook...

WTF is that URL by the way?

Many Skylake systems are like this today. You can boot Windows 7 but there are no USB 2.0 ports so you have no keyboard or mouse. You have to go through an incredibly tedious procedure of slipstreaming USB 3 drivers into the installation, and you don't always know whether you have the right ones from Intel's site.

Restricting disk access seems like a much more foolproof way of closing this off ;-). Businesses can't buy this laptop and use their volume license of Windows 7, which is entirely the point. They can also build in obsolescence in the future by removing driver support.

You might be able to get an OS they're not keen on installed, but if you can't see the disk you've got no chance of getting it installed ;-).

I haven't looked but I also very much doubt there is a Windows 7 driver for this.......... ;-).

They are using disk drivers to restrict what gets installed - not just Linux both other Windows - Windows 7 or future versions of Windows which they want to build hardware obsolescence into and force you into throwing good hardware away.

That's very likely.

Why wouldn't they? You find out all sorts of things when you work for a company, strangely enough.

They enabled something by default that I have not seen on any other system and disabled a way of changing it, which virtually every other system supports.

There is no good reason for this. Whatsoever.

Errrr, it's haemorrhaging cash? There are plenty of other solar companies that don't have those overheads and would be cheaper.

The battery technology is certainly where Tesla have a big lead. It's not really the battery chemistry per se, but building and engineering a battery pod that is safe and that keeps battery cells in a consistently good state whether under charging or discharging. Once a battery starts losing performance it only accelerates. If you have to keep it in a good window and it will last for many years. Liquid cooling is also the way to be doing this.

They're also right about hydrogen fuel cells. They're stupid. Maybe if we get into space and can get an abundance of hydrogen things will be great. But, here on Earth you have to manufacture the hydrogen and create a vast infrastructure to transport and store it.

Tesla also have a big lead in the use of telemetry and their ability to do software updates over the air and their approach to security and building this in-house. Other car manufacturers will continue to outsource this and continue to fuck up completely.

However, Tesla had to follow through with all of this, maybe be out of the public eye for a while and iterate over the engineering, keeping costs to a minimum and doing the R and D, before moving on to other capitally expensive projects. They've massively overstretched and I don't see it being recoverable.

Few want him to fail, and we'd all love the grand plans to succeed....but at some point a dose of realism has to be injected. Elon isn't a pied piper. We do need to think for ourselves occasionally, as do investors.

I am not hoping he fails, and certainly where battery tech is concerned Tesla have moved on R and D - especially when it comes to battery pods and keeping batteries at a consistent temperature and state.

But.....the grand visions before the boring grunt work of engineering has been accomplished, and trying to build massive $5 billion factories before any kind of profitability is on the horizon is not going to help Tesla stick around beyond a few years at most.

I'm afraid it's a case of "Show me the money", meaning, "Have you achieved what you say you can and have before you move on to the next grand vision of the future?"

For him to say that 'stage one' is complete is laughable. We haven't seen Model 3s on sale for $35,000 yet, we haven't seen whether Tesla can get the required production (which they simply can't) and they haven't achieved profit on any car at all yet.

Whatever. It's kind of like arguing whether you sat on deckchairs or garden chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

Funny, but inevitable. Musk was asked specifically if Tesla would takeover SpaceX or vice versa in a tesla conference call and he said no, but it is really inevitable. Without some creative accounting through shifting investor cash and grants from one company to another Solar City has no future, and that then goes for Tesla as well.