Well aware

I'm well aware of the "price it high to stab the initial buyers" of economics. The point I was making is that the Prime isn't stabbing at a lofty starting price (such as is done with graphics cards) and sinking down to a "reasonable" price. Much like the iPad (when have you seen the iPad2 base model "sink" in price?), it is sold at a fair price and doesn't necessarily "sink" toward an "equilibrium" price. Hence the comparison. I'm just pointing out the obvious benefits of the product; no "iRage" required.

/coat due to being a quick comment that shouldn't have been bothered to be explained.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth means nothing if your latency is ~150ms. You may be able to shove a 3MB excel file down the pipe in a few seconds, but clicking around in your financial software will take hours.

Narrowmindedness

Yep, a load of crap forced upon the workers by management is a common plague. I was in the fortunate position to steer our midsized biz away from tape backups (had 4 servers with tape drives, just to pull the data in time for nightlies, granted the CTO wanted full nightlies...) to a D2D2D method. Unfortunately, there's not many affordable solutions out there for how we wanted/needed to do it. A NetApp VTL gets halfway there, but that's a 5-digit figure for an "almost fits" solution. Needless to say, a Linux server and some development time, we have a proper functional system now. Not quite as clean as a pretty packaged NetApp server, but it does precisely what we wanted.

Headline

The headline is that FileVault was the most recent "feature" added to this software, finally catching up to 2005 known vulns. It already supported some methods of decrypting BitLocker and TrueCrypt.

TrueCrypt

I don't know of a common encryption system that isn't vulnerable if the password has been entered and the machine is still on, but TrueCrypt is a great option still. For one, they're aware of this RAM issue, and they actively wipe the RAM that contained the valid decryption key when you properly unmount a TrueCrypt volume or shutdown. Therefore, if you want security, just unmount your volume or shutdown the system properly (don't yank the plug). You're safe. As for decrypting a TrueCrypt volume, they may be referring to the same type of RAM vulnerability to do so. I doubt their rainbow tables or dictionary attacks will work against a TrueCrypt volume with a decently long password (15+ chars) and a keyfile or two. Rainbow tables used to crack WEP were several TB in size.

RAM

RAM contents have a decay period. When you power up a computer normally, RAM registers are reset to zero automatically, since they may contain latent data. If you take a RAM stick and stuff it in a device that is designed not to do this, you may be able to read the contents if you're quick enough.

Therefore, REGFAIL for not explaining such, and YOUFAIL for not reading up first. :)

Fired?

"Perhaps one of the design engineers that they recently fired knows what it means."

If you churned out the pile that was Bulldozer, wouldn't you expect to get sacked too?

Just determine your Total Cost of Ownership. Fortunately, you have an iPad1, so you likely have all the dongles and adapters needed to interface with common stuff (computers, speakers, tvs etc). You can get a Transformer Prime with the keyboard for less than the 16GB iPad2. How much does the bluetooth iPad keyboard cost? The Transformer keyboard even comes with a battery pack the size of what's in the tablet. Plus, you can get it NOW. Not a hard decision really, considering the "rumored" items are just what the Prime already has (minus the supposed screen resolution and the obvious assortment of Android-common connectivity slots).

Pay more?

"...as they pay more..."

It can be had, with the keyboard dock, for under $500, which is better than the iPad of similar 16GB storage can claim. Only things that beat it would be sub-par 'droid-based tablets of a dual-core (or less!) variety. I, for one, am glad they stuffed it with a quad-core chip, decent RAM and storage, and pitched it at a price-point to make one seriously pass over a Galaxy Tab...

Like....

"If you have technology that you rely on then it should work under any circumstances."

Or if your iPhone battery flat-lines in 30min due to the latest iOS update.... Can't even call a cab because the phone is dead....

Collection

They have a collector strap-on device for the iPad....just put some electrodes in the end. Can double up as "pleasure enhancers" too....

7"

Still only has a 7" screen. I'd gladly pay the extra 2x for the Asus Prime Transformer.

They're likely true, however, in 6-9mo when the phone comes out, it will release using the usual 6mo-old tech and somewhat underwhelming specs, but be vigorously defended with comments of "it's so efficient and good that it doesn't need all that RAM or CPU power..."

All I have to say is microSD slot and HDMI.... Total cost of Ownership comes back to bite iFans.

Servers

Cheap Fiber Channel/FCoE replacement anyone? FC only does 4Gbps....

Last I checked....

....OSX running Safari was the first to get p0wned the last few times....

Opera

Might as well throw in lynx, links, or elinks while you're at it.

I once surfed the web on telnet. GET / was my friend.

Power

"As I understand it the four processors of T3 consume less than the two of the previous T2."

It's not that they consume less power, which is likely true anyway, it's that they have that ride-along 500Mhz core that does the light lifting while your phone is not running full-on. That's assuming this S3 is running Tegra3 of course....

A few comments

Joe: "i'd expect people who are buying higher end GPUs to be more likely to opt for an SSD instead of a traditional HDD."

You can't squeeze Battlefield 3, World of Warcraft, Crysis 2, and other such games onto a 120GB SSD comfortably, nor does it make much sense to do so. These gamer enthusists likely would need additional storage for multimedia and the like as well. Just because someone is willing to pay ~$400 for a video card (or two) doesn't mean they'll fork out for an upgrade on a computer on the eve of the Ivy Bridge launch, or the eve of the new Radeons and GeForce cards. And they certainly would avoid paying premiums on new HDDs when their old one(s) can be carried forward.

Article: "And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC OEMs' ability to include a GPU in their systems"

That should likely read: "And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC OEMs' ability to include a GPU in their systems, forcing them to realize there's a GPU built into the CPU nowadays anyway." (since most are flogging Intel, or pushing a cheapo AMD with on-board (integrated) GPU.

Yep

You can get a craptastic 60" TV from Walmart for ~$899 or pay upwards to a nice 3D 240Hz bell+whistle 55" name brand for a hair over $2000 (if you don't know how to shop). It then comes down to having a feature-less OLED 55" or a everything-plus-dog 55" LCD that's "good enough" and pocket the $3k difference (new HTPC and desktop rig for the difference I'd say...)

IPS, etc.

IPS laptop screens exist, but you'll be paying Apple-like prices to get your hands on one.

What I'd like to see is these 4K screens in a laptop. It's hard enough to find a laptop sporting a 1080p screen and the next iPad3 and Prime Transformer will have larger than 1080p crammed into a 10" (touch)screen.

Yep

"Is there a manual for my phone anywhere"

Yep. Usually comes in the box your phone came in. Mine's a couple hundred pages thick, so I tossed it back in the box like everyone else apparently. Samsung's Charge has a screenshot in it by hitting home and back at the same time (obviously doesn't work very well). ICS has screenshot built in and is easy to do, so such a feature app will be unnecessary moving forward.

Sad News

The sad news is, RAID5 (and now default RAID6) is the cheapest way to maximize storage space with as few disks as possible. (10x2TB disks in RAID6 gives more space than 10x2TB in RAID10 for instance.) Unfortunately, RAID10 is in the same (but slightly better-but-worse off) position as RAID6. To rebuild a RAID10 failed disk, the system only needs to access a single disk and copy it verbatim. However, with an unrecoverable read error on the single disk (less likely than would happen in a RAID6 btw, do the math!), you end up in the same pecarious boat as RAID6, with less disk space, but better performance.

Now, this segways into the next point to take: SSDs bottleneck RAID cards in any form of checksum (RAID5-ish) setup. Now, with how the firmware for SSDs are designed, a URE is extremely less likely compared to a whole-disk failure, thus proving them likely more ideal in a striping environment (also considering that in a mirroring setup, each drive would theoretically have the same exact writes and wear, assuming the controller doesn't use an RNG for allocation or cleanup, thus suggesting near-same failure times, which isn't seen as often due to varying endurance for each cell). Side note would be that the drive would fail in read-only mode, thus a "custom" RAID solution could use it to rebuild most/all of the replacement disk....but I digress. Disk storage will still be the leader when it comes to shear data storage, thus the need to address resiliency in RAID. An interesting thought/solution would be a RAID0+1+1, which would scale slightly worse (available space-wise) than RAID61, have 1disk less worse-case resiliency, but a lot better rebuild performance and rebuild resiliency (as the first RAID0 would work at full speed and the second would be used for mirrored reads (think read striping across mirrored disks as well as across the stripe), and the one disk that is the second mirror to the disk that failed can be soley dedicated to restoring the missing drive. (Don't bring in the primary, as it would cause head-thrashing on the target rebuild disk since 2:1 read:write would only work if it was appropriately striped reads). A single URE would be protected against due to the dual mirror remaining, or if you're unlucky single disk remaining. Any involvement of checksumming would unfortunately hobble any SSD implementation of such an array, but for disks, it could be acceptible. The caveat for a RAID011 is that it has worst-case resiliency on par with a triple-checksum stripe (RAID7 I believe). It just has the benefits of having low processing overhead and near RAID0 performance even in "degraded" mode, which could be more important than the lower resiliency in some/most cases.

Any other thoughts or flames?

Trinity will have a slighly upgraded GPU compared to Brazos, however Ivy Bridge will have a significant step up in GPU from Sandy Bridge. Will it bring enough performance to compete against an integrated Radeon? Not a chance. They're mainly trying to include DX11 support and pump out a few more FPS. Trinity's biggest weakness will be the Bulldozer cores, which would hobble any GPU beefier than the built-in one. This is where Ivy Bridge will excel, allowing Intel to significantly underclock/volt their laptop-binned chips and maintain on-par performance (with Trinity) at significantly lower TDPs. With an add-on wifi chip, it will use more power than the built-in WiFi planned for Ivy Bridge, so :( to that too. Will the price save AMD? Likely, as raw CPU performance is no where near as important (or noticable) for the lay user nowadays. The battery life will be a decisive factor though, separating out the long-lifers from the perma-plug users.

Pack up

"well, here’s a [i]phone that is simple to use and does what you need it to do."

Here's your side of diapers since you likely aren't smart enough to use the Loo either....

Shame really....

No one really looks at the "total cost of ownership" for Apple devices. Sure, the device may be of similar price ($500 iPad2 for instance), but when you tack on extra costs (+16GB internal flash due to not having a microSD slot, +$100-$200), cost of HDMI adapter dongle (~$50), i-branded docking stations/speakers/carkits/etc (outrageous), they start to lose their appeal.

The only thing levied against Android in TCO was user time (to root the phone, flash CyanogenMod, etc etc as desired). Personally, it works* out of the box for 99% of people, as does the iPhone

* for varying degrees of "works" (functionality, capability, appearance, universality and connectivity)

Time

Unix StarDate 57429.29....

That is all....

Camera

"Depending on the MPs they could have a range of STDs to choose from..."

Dunno about you, but I can think of several STDs (not to mention skin diseases) that are easily identifiable with a simple smartphone camera....Can I haz the $10mil?

Decimal places

You may want to check your decimals. I come out with 4.2328hrs to write the whole tape, assuming the top speed of 210MB/s is consistant (and assuming it doesn't need a read pass for verification or the like)

It happens

Shows what happens when you cut funding (or simply don't provided enough cash in the first place) for a space agency: you get expensive duds rather than results. I wonder if the USA is watching this and learning....likely not....

Reader

Apparently, you don't read Reg articles: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/06/remotefx/

Lingo

"Fukishima had a catastrophic meltdown that didn't kill anyone" Doesn't it have to be a catastrophy to be "catastrophic"? Last I checked, Fukishima was a partial meltdown, but no where near a "catastrophy" such as Chernobyl.... As for climate change, the polarization is whether humans are causing it or not. Perhaps the argument should be "no significant [human-caused] warming." Just because our models are flawed (they don't take into account all environmental factors, so you can't say they are not), doesn't mean they're wrong; just inaccurate. It's the fact that our current temperatures are not where they were projected to be that should be more conclusive.

Close'n'go

I frequently close'n'go with my laptop. So much so that I tell the "close lid" action to "do nothing." Makes it readily available when I get to the near destination, no need to wait for wireless to rehook, DHCP to resolve, sleep to resume, etc. The ability to see what that email bloop was without having to awkwardly open the laptop is an added bonus. Unfortunately, it sounds like it needs to run Windows 8 to get the featureset....

Legit

"Looks like a legit patent filing from Apple as well."

I must say, it is a legit patent idea from Apple, for once. The reason no one else thought of it first? They did, but it's obviously a terrible idea, as noted in the article. Lose the adapter with the PC (carrying case anyone?) and you're toast. This may make more sense for a USB-charged phone (as you can have many USB cables, but only one wall-wart USB adapter that is toted around in a bag, but your phone is usually separate in a pocket on one's person. Then again, how many people actually lock their phone with anything harder than 1234 or a 1379 swipe?

Clouds

"Astrophysics are just a bit messed up because we've evidence for things that act in certain ways (for example dark matter and dark energy) but we've not got much evidence yet for what they are"

Galactic dust clouds without an illuminating source.

/mines the one with the flashlight in the pocket

Kinect

Just hook your Kinect up to it. It can do anything!

Nah

IE group-sources a file's malicious intent, just as much as Chrome likely will. Several tools and installers (php5 win32 installer for instance) get flagged as "not often downloaded" and you have to overwrite the system by using "Actions..." rather than the default DELETE button. As annoying as this may be, I am willing to bet it's saved countless computards from installing crapware since they can't figure out where the "Open" button is now. Looks like Chrome is just following suit. Just means less money for us free-lance virii cleaners....

Simples

Don't buy the cheapo kit.

ISP-supplied router/modem/All-in-Ones usually have such cut-throat hardware that it likely can barely process a single computer connection to the internet, and only if you're just surfing a minimalist website.

Daft

Sounds like you think that 80MHz is the frequency the wifi was specced to run at, rather than the bandwidth of the wifi in the 5GHz range. Hopefully your reading comprehension is better in whatever line of work you do.

I wonder

I wonder at what point the scales will tip and Microsoft will start making more money from their licensing on android handsets than from WinPhone sales....

Upside

"a method of playing audible advertisements to mobile users before they make a call"

There's an upside: it may make the kiddies NOT actually want to make that call to their friend, especially if it is a 30sec advert.

I'd get one simply to give the kids for simple "call me when the movie is over" comms. Beats having to do an extra cell phone on a family plan (price-wise).

HTPC

One would wonder huh? Would be funny to see MS sue an HTPC company using Windows as the "interface" that integrates a DVR viewer (Windows Media Player) with a gaming console (think having Steam open in another window would count?).

The miracle would be if they make the nextbox power-efficient enough in "off"-but-DVR-mode to keep your front room ambient temp lower than the 80*F the XBox360 makes it....

List of Apps

"Providing a list of desktop apps that were installed and allowing you to choose which ones to reinstall would be better than ditching all of them though."

Not if that list has "Windows Antivirus 2011" or other such malware in it....Users were fooled enough to think it was a good program when ransomed to pay for it, what makes you think they won't think it's a good app upon refresh?

"CPU cycles as the most precious data centre resource..." again

The OP still missed it. CPUs are cheap. The Author's slight sounded like a stab at Virtualization, where apparently his mantra is "squeeze every bit out of the CPU as we can!". This is false. Businesses don't virtualize to drive up CPU utilization; they virtualize to reduce hardware count. Sure, a 10-core CPU goes mostly wasted being a mail server with 15K SAS disks. Stuffing PCIe flash won't improve the matter any. However, treat the SERVER as the most precious data centre resource, stack it high with VMs to utilize the CPU and RAM, you'll need something with high IOPS (be it remote or local storage) since hosting 10 VMs all doing various loads of sequential and random access will look like a bunch of random access requests (think, two sequential reads will have to interleave the segments, causing the heads to jump across the disk swapping back and forth, unless it prioritizes a whole file ahead of the other, which disk access doesn't really do). This is why high IOPS is in demand in virtualized environments. Each server is doing its own thing. If a server was I/O bound as bare-metal, think of how behind it gets when stacked with 6 other (even occassionally) I/O bound VMs.

The one good mark I can give is that the Author stressed that NAS/SAN isn't dead, but that they just need flash too, and that there are limits to the benefits of DAS. Unfortunately, that's about all of the topic the author seems to grasp.

Crosses Fine

Just the other day, I restored a Clonezilla image of a Win7 box from Intel SNB hardware to a Core2 system (both HP biz fortunately). Runs fine. Took the hard drive out of an AMD AM2+ mobo system and plopped it in a AM3 mobo system. The only glitch was the nVidia drivers needed to be removed beforehand so the AMD Radeon vid card switch-in wouldn't toast the OS on load (still was able to remove the vid drivers by swapping the old vid card into the new system, remove the drivers, then pop the Radeon back in). Simples.

Win7 isn't as bad off as XP when it comes to underlying hardware change. You can even move from SATA IDE emulation mode to AHCI with a one-liner registry change.

Trevor, your setup sounds quite extravagant, and I do hope your SNB $750 HTPC runs well hosting the 3 or 4 XP VMs that you allocate for "all your computing needs except gaming." However, I for one know that it would not work for most tech-savy users, as my web-browsing alone takes up over 750MB of RAM (yes, I have lots of research threads open, usually 6 or 7 separate browser windows with multiple tabs each). Hope you decked out that SNB with 16GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD, which is the only way it would be tolerable if both you and your family are using it concurrently.

Something you might want to look into is an nCompute setup. Works like RDP, but is a separate physical thinbox client. It's more seamless than a Wyse or the like, and gives you a more-native view than an RDP session. Also would save you having to run your i5 w/ an nVidia power-sucker just so you can tote around the internet in an RDP session.