Re: From a company who are regarded (with some justice) as master marketeers it seems to me....

"fanbois" and "think"....

I see what you did there...

Re: Only took a few posts

Because Apple will bring themselves into it by attempting to sue Samsung over something about the S3, perhaps that they colored it white.

Re: Xbox Loss?

The Touchpad firesale made it VERY successful (sold millions of units overnight), however, how profitable do you think was? Exactly.

Re: In the USA

"I worked in healthcare and,...our organisation was forced to support Macs"

So, I take it you were still using a paper chart for your patients? Most EHR systems are Windows only. If you point at a "web-based" EHR and tell me they could just use that, then I do not believe your "healthcare" experience was with more than 1 provider....

Re: Cheesy article...or should I say Fruity article?

"...5 year old Mac is still a pretty good computer today."

And if you spent just half of what you did on your Mac on a decent PC instead, you'd find that the same statement would hold true. Of course, if you tried to run something other than iTunes and Safari on your 5-year-old computer, you'll find that "pretty good" doesn't quite cut it in Creative Suite 6 or some modern games (if they even run on OSX in the first place).

Re: bigger != better

@Bassey: "They aren't forcing you to buy them. There are litterally hundreds of choices out there." Perhaps the OP has an iPhone...then you're wrong on both parts (first part is in the T&C under "recurring business requirement", right after the "proselytizing" section).

Transformer

This will be out end of June, Transformer Infinity will be out early June.... Hrm, wonder which one will win (also considering the new Tosh tab is the same specs as the current Transformer Prime....).

Re: Go SpaceX -- waste?

Space gives us SatNav. Cell towers give us mobile phones (unless yours is of the brick type from the likes of Iridium and other sat phone ilk).

Gateway NV73

My Gateway NV73 is 17" screen, granted the resolution isn't a preferred 1080p, but with TWO storage bays, I could easily have 2TB of HDD space. Granted, I don't need that, even remotely on a laptop. If you want to "create content" and need 1.5TB+, your content is likely high-def video. Spreadsheets and Word docs are easy to fit on a 500GB, not to mention storing loads of pictures to boot. The NV73 has well spaced USB ports (2 per side), well spaced HDMI, VGA, NIC, etc ports. If you're having port-cram issues, try shopping in a realm of computing that doesn't believe in one model of computer for all (you gave away that you punch on a Mac with your port and keypad woe pictures). Oh, my NV73 has a full numpad as well.

Why do I have these features? I specifically sought them out. I can plug in fat USB sticks, HDMI, type with a numpad for spreadsheets, have a spacey and comfortable keyboard, and view it all on a screen that I don't have to squint to see. It's also nice to have a SSD+HDD storage space. Oh, did I mention it was $430? You don't have to go expensive to get a great PC. In another year, I'll dump another ~$450 for another mid-range computer that will still be less than the woeful MacBook, but outperform it by then.

VM servers

I have several banks of mainstream SSDs hosting VMs. Blazingly fast, no problems. 3/1 read/write ratio. Our workstations (also SSDs) have even better read/write ratios. You'll find that it is rare ($100k+/server data center situations) that you require 10+ full writes of the drive per day. In those environments, you're likely running a very large SAN with 40Gbps links and have loads of money to toss at these SSDs. Your data likely requires it. However, even for mid-level enterprise, setting up a RAID10 with mainstream drives, even with the need to pop drives once a year, the savings are enormous. It would be far easier to simply buy 512GB drives when you were only planning 200GB drives, and buying twice as many at that, and solve any potential "speed" issues or "data resiliency" issues using common methods: "spindle count" and RAID-type methods. Think your SandForce 2xxx series 500MB/s read/write is slow? Buy 2 and RAID1 them. Still too slow? Make a RAID10 out of a bank of 24. Leave a few disks out as hot spares even. Bump them to 512GB rather than 240GB. A bank of 24 240GB Vertex3s run $9600 (give or take sales/promotions). Assuming, 20 live drives in a RAID10, running even just SATA2, and assuming the RAID controller can even handle it, you have potentially 3.2GB/s (GigaBYTES, not bits) of read throughput, same for writes. Also, 2.3TB of usable space.

Either that set up or a single 400GB enterprise SSD sitting on a SAS channel in a server....hrm, I don't think it will be a hard choice for me.

Re: Sure

The Transformer series from Asus does a good job at providing content-creation capabilities (keyboard dock, microSD reader, USB port, etc). Sporting Android 4, they can get their foot in the door. iOS on the other hand, has a large established userbase, and who would want to dump their $100's spend on usb, hdmi, SDcard, radio tuner, etc dongles and speaker docks? Fortunately, there's less secondary market in the Android space because you don't need to carry around a bag of dongles to get USB, HDMI, or microSD support. You can even hook up your PS3/XBox360 controller and play emulators if you so desired. Apple makes money hand over fist on the iOS ecosystem because people are willing to pay for it, and then get nickle-and-dimed for additional functionality.

Re: Share Value

"...a faster processor..."

Wrong. It's the same old 1GHz dual core, just with some extra graphics oomph to drive the high-res screen. (see http://www.reghardware.com/2012/03/13/apple_ipad_3_tablet_benchmarked/)

Want something faster?

http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/compare/577328/550834

Re: It depends...

It isn't that he can't get a refund (although, he is likely far outside the normal return window by now), it is most likely a bid for fame. HOWEVER, if he doesn't fight it (due to having an excess of time on hand is likely), but instead quietly returns the device as bunk vs adverts, how can such an errant advertising campaign be stopped? I can't say how many people I've spoken to that whisper to me in back corners about this "new thing" that is Siri and extolling the advertising-based knowledge of the wonders of this feature. They refuse to believe anything I say about Siri not living up to the hype. It's sad really. Good for this guy to actually call Apple out on their adverts.

Re: really?

Sounds like there was more blame to lay at the feet of Brink developer than at AMD, considering they implemented it in OpenGL and screwed up their implementation of it at that. nVidia just needs the edge enough they're willing to fudge their drivers to work around flawed games.

Re: Those prices converted to GBP

Problem is, those are 2xxx part numbers, which are Sandy Bridge CPUs, not Ivy Bridge. FAIL.

Re: Any word...

Just use a password that has a suitably long length. Likelihood in this case was she used a poor (short) password. TrueCrypt can offer great security, but it can't save you from yourself when your password is less than 10 characters or you don't use keyfiles.

"Sorry Your Honor, my hard drive was encrypted with multiple keyfiles but I can't remember which ones they were as I had only just set it up the night before my house was raided..."

Re: Disk shortage = Not a major impact on servers

I agree. I know our corp would have bought a few E5 servers had they been available.....

Re: IT security staff?

Yep. The whole article can be summed up with this paragraph from it:

Management may also be the problem, not the IT worker. "As an experiment," Corman said, "explain to your children what it is you're trying to explain to your chief security officer. If they get it and he doesn't, then the problem isn't with you."

In my position, I work in tandem with an actual knowledgable CIO, and surprise surprise, we accomplish our goals and get the job done.

Re: Re: User storage...

Last I checked, my 32GB microSD card has a grand total of 100MB of apps, and nearly 14GB of vids and pics I haven't cleaned/culled/copied-off yet. A phone, especially one boasting its camera/vid features should be REQUIRED to have a removable SD card. Oh, and ICS supports removable storage, just look at the ICS tablets with a microSD slot...

Re: Yawn

HTC already announced their streamlining of phones down to variations of a single model type, similar to how Apple does it with the iPhone. This is their attempt at getting a distinction by design, similar to how an iPhone is readily recognizable (without even needing to see the apple on the back).

Re: Re: Re: Specs

"i would be able to get everything i wanted for myself, the wife and the kids straight away."

...Except hook up to the HDMI port of a tv/monitor, unless you buy that i-branded addon and thus, invalidating your "without needing to carry an aux cable around." comment/downside of the Android tab. Unfortunately, this tablet doesn't have a microUSB charging port, so you have to carry around your own form of the i-device proprietary connector. You would think you could achieve docking capability by having a few strategically-placed USB/etc ports at the docking-point, or at least 1 proprietary port and a standard microUSB port.

The iPod nanos are nice though. Shame it requires iTunes to manage....

Re: 2.5 inch drive. 1.2 TB.

1.2TB flash drive for how many thousands of $$$? Likely close to $2k (if it were cheap).

Re: @Richard12

Renewables have their place. The Gobi, Sahara, most of Southwest USA, etc for solar (and wind in some cases). Solar is more likely than wind turbines to give decent returns. Wave (tidal) turbines are a good start too, but the best move forward would be nuclear plants. With huge amounts of electricity available at fractions of the cost of power today, electric-only cars, trains, equipment, etc would take off in a big way. Imagine proximity chargers (induction or otherwise) under parking stalls at Walmart (or just plugs, either way), down freeway stretches, at the employee parking at work, etc. Your furnace would be electric rather than gas. Hot water would be electric rather than gas. Another big thing would be the readily available electricity for the fusion reactor experiments, since those take the power of an entire city (or more!) to actually get the reactor jump-started (and running, since they're not self-sustaining yet).

Re: Boot up times

You missed that it was iLO that booted in under 5 seconds (under 3 seconds is what the story says). You can easily cut all the boot and initialization stuff out by loading a VM hypervisor on it :)

Re: Cores

@Renato:

The performance metric that counts is the amount of RAM on the device. "Droidtards" have real multitasking, so they can switch between web-browsing (while it's loading) to pull up their playlist, pop over to a remote desktop window, jump back to their picture album, etc etc etc, all without causing disconnects (with the webpage or remote desktop), nor having to page RAM to/from the flash storage. Without this multitasking ability for iOS, they don't need to load up iDevices with more than their 512MB allotment. (iOS has limited multitasking for i-branded apps only, so yes you can play your iTunes music while surfing, I know).

Now, how to power all of these things, plus anything else that might come up in the next year or so you own the device? A quad-core chip should do it. Since the platform is threaded as a standard (unlike the Windows environment of yester-year), all 4 cores could actually get used. Zipping around on a single core with a 800x600 screen (or worse, the phone you cited) won't see much of a performance bottleneck (CPU-wise) with your apparent workload. Mine, however, makes even 1GB RAM dual core chippery fall over (props to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 for handling it best though). We'll see if the iPad2S can top what we can pick up today with the Asus Transformer Prime.

Re: How in hell can "standards-essential patents" exist?

The crux of the matter is that Motorola offered their FRAND licensing to Apple to an amount that falls within the "Fair and Resonable" licensing scheme (albeit likely the top end, but still within the limits), and Apple rejected it and STILL used the patented technology. Similar to Apple suing Samsung for using an OS (which they got from Google) that had rounded corners on icons that are arrayed in a grid on the screen. If the technology supplied by Qualcomm is the only infringment in question, and if the licensing to Qualcomm covers third-parties that use said Qualcomm chips, then Motorola doesn't have a leg to stand on. Of course, this is likely not the case, or else this suit would have been readily tossed already.

Re: Only a 'Tick'

There's more than just a die shrink in Ivy Bridge. The tri-gate transistors and the bump in integrated graphics performance just to name two. Need more? Extra PCIe lanes, PCIe 3.0 and native support for USB3. The die shrink and tri-gate transistors alone allows them to drop the core voltage fairly significantly, thus saving power.

My money is sitting until Ivy Bridge comes out. I doubt AMD will come up with a suitable competitor by then (not holding my breath with Piledriver), which is why Intel can sit on their stockpile rather than slash prices a bit to shift it.

Re: Re: Pure marketing ploy

"...while Intel is also troubled by its Sandy Bridge processor inventory, the CPU giant plans to delay mass shipments of the new processors to minimize the impact"

So, because their CPUs are still priced high (just shy of launch prices, due to no real competition from AMD), no one buys their chip stocks en masse, so rather than slash the price a bit to shift them, they'll just sit on their current prices until their stockpile goes down.

Come on AMD! This is what competition is supposed to prevent!

Cars and Fakes

Car or no, fake iPads or no, Apple lost the case due to using a registered trademark "iPad" for selling its tablets. The fakes are still out there because they do not use "iPad" in the name, they just look the same. Just like that handbag that has a slight misspelling of a certain brand name....

Orientation

This one was even designed to be oriented vertically like the iPad....Apple may have some ground to stand on this time.... :P

Additionally

If these disks are stuck in a RAID, does that mean IBM developed a RAID controller that passes TRIM through to the SSDs? Or at the very least, these disks will have garbage collection to prevent them from performing like a SSDNow drive....

Life Span != MTBF

"OCZ VERTEX 3 SATA III 2.5" SSD 240GB life span is 2 Milion hours."

Mean-Time Between Failure is not "Life Span." Here's an example from a reference:

Example: "MTBF of 100,000 hours. [This figure] indicate[s] that in a population of 1,000,000 batteries, there will be approximately ten battery failures every hour during a single battery's four-hour life span. This is because during that one hour, the 1,000,000 batteries were operational for a sum of 1,000,000 hours; dividing total uptime (1,000,000) with MTBF (100,000) we get the average number of failures."

So, one SSD in a group of 2mil dying every hour, while good odds, doesn't ensure your drive won't pop its clogs in the next 2 hours. Next in line is that mainstream mechanical drives barely crest the 1mil MTBF mark...

As for write-endurance, I've heard of numerous drives having hardware/firmware deaths, but not many (if any) write-endurance problems.

Default Rate

"...would like the threat of injunction removed from all FRAND patents, so no one could use a FRAND patent to have anyone else's products removed from the shelf."

So, in Apple's case, if you reject licensing a FRAND patent, due to being asked the high-end of the stick of a "fair and reasonable" price, simply because you wanted the El Cheapo end, and go ahead and make the product anyway expecting to just fight it out in courts (if it comes to that, as it's expensive for SMBs), you don't get the right to block said company from selling the device and are simply left with spending millions in court to get your previous "fair and reasonable" royalty they owed you legally anyway?

Lock-In

This just in, most Windows PC owners upgrade to....a PC.

Why? Your collection of software only works on Windows. Same reason I tell Apple users (with a truckload of follow-along software) to stay on Apple. For those websurfers and the like, it's quite a free choice. I just know if I had $100+ worth of iPhone apps, I'd be less likely to jump ship to Android or vice versa.

No big deal

Or just set your Avast to ask you what to do with malware/virii when they're encountered. Simple matter of "allow to run unsandboxed" and you're golden. Unless you're purposely trolling malware/virii infesting things, you'd rarely see a popup asking what to do anyway. Saves a lot of headache for false positives.

All Roads Lead to Rome

When you design a laptop, there's little you can do to get a "solid" feel. Sure, they could carve the laptop case out of steel, but that wouldn't satisfy the weight category now would it? Aluminium it is. You can see this in PC cases, steel for cheapos with aluminium for higher end.

Keyboards have some potential variation, but chiclite style is still fairly common, no big news there. Black keys on an aluminium surround? Oh noes.... At least they're backlit.

Various designs stray into the realm of blending trackpads, minimizing the bezel, or going for a designer plastic casing vs metal. Why Samsung didn't pick one of these other options? The question to you is, "Do you think it's fugly?" Why would they pick those other designs if you answered "yes"?

Fortunately, all this consideration and market research was unnecessary for Samsung to conduct, as it could simply ape the hodge-podge that Apple tossed together.

NetBackup complexity

Yes, NetBackup is more complex. rsync would only be part of the Big Picture. You still wouldn't be able to do client-side dedup (disk/processor intensive), but you'd at least get a synthetic backup with inline compression during transport. rsnapshot would help you manage backup snapshots, similar to NetApp, but at a far worse disadvantage. Then there's the matter of CPIOing it to tape or the like, which NetApp can handle in spades (as long as you like managed tape sets). The advantage your rsync/rsnapshot has is cost, at the expense of "lets hope it keeps working." Granted, NetApp becomes a black box appliance as well, but at least it has commercial support....

Nah

Nah, no need to fluff around in the dark when the article cites the cause of the explosion....