PV

PV has promise, even in the climate of the UK. However, wind power is way more expensive, and requires ongoing maintenance to sustain, and it relies on how regular the wind is. Keep the subs in PV, reduce funding for wind farms.

Side-effect

Perhaps they should patent iDiapers for handling the consequent by-product of fuel cells....

GPU

Based on the cursory overview provided, it actually sounds like a nice GPU. Granted, with the performance improvement in "performancy/sq mm", it leads me to think there's only a small 110% speed bump over the last-gen 6970. Even so, the feature set will be nice. If their ZeroCore works as one would hope, perhaps we'll have a GPU that fair better than 120W at "idle" (rendering desktop only). Incorporating Turbo Boost is an interesting ploy too, as it allows that OCers may have been doing manually/semi-automatically for some time: cranking the GPU into OC mode during game play, and reverting to normal/underclock for desktop use (especially considering that the GPU in some cases sucks more watts than the rest of the computer combined). Wasn't that the point of leaving the Intel HD gfx core on Sandy Bridge strapped to your monitor with a bit of Virtu magic to (hopefully, but didn't work very well) put your gfx card in idle outside of games?

6310

Not just the 6310, but blackberries have been doing this since day one. Same with Palm devices.

Missed....

The call to developers was due to the API bump for ICS, not flash. The flash 11.1 update was just a headliner. Try reading past the first paragraph.

Bah

"The fruity firm gets many of the components for its iPhones and iPads from Chinese suppliers..."

Such a juicy line, and then you beat me to it Jedit: ".. it was the battery overheating, right?"

Was gonna say "They must be making iPhone batteries...." or somesuch :(

Dying

The only thing dying about Seagate is likely the company itself due to a bad reputation on hard disk failures. HDDs won't be killed by SSDs anytime soon as SSDs are limited by the die-size of the cells (currently dropping to around 22nm). Once they hit a point of diminishing returns (7-12nm likely), they'll have to start going to 3-level MLC or higher, and likely have to stack chips to up their density. Regardless, HDDs still have a higher bit density and easier/lower cost to manufacture. Furthermore, we know that NAND flash is running the end of its era and that other flash technologies will be stepping in within the next 3 years, hopefully yielding better densities and economies of scale, but we know there are similar "new" techs being developed by HDD companies (BPM, HAMR, etc) that will allow HDDs to easily reach 10TB with only 3 platters in the next 5 years.

Works better than Seagate

That is all

That is all

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=MTBF+testing

Other People

"The pickup was then struck from behind by a school bus, which was plowed into by a second school bus. Two people were killed and 38 were injured.

...In addition, the driver of the first bus had been distracted by a motorcoach that had pulled to the side of the road, and the driver of the second bus was faulted for following the first bus too closely."

I'm glad the article continued to quote and included the excuses of the two bus drivers. However bad the texting lad (who died) was doing, the two bus drivers (who were not using PEDs per their statement) STILL ran into him. PEDs are killers for sure, but no worse than DUI, makeup, smoking, playing with the radio dials, etc, etc, etc. Unfortunately, texting while driving is about as enforceable as DUI, but instead of a breathalizer, they need a laptop with your cell records.

Overthinking....

X-ray imaging works by looking at a shadow, since what we're looking at (bone and the like) doesn't normally emit enough x-rays to get a good image. HOWEVER, gas clouds, supernovae, and the like DO emit x-rays and thus would be quite detectable by someone who's vision worked in the x-ray band rather than in the "visible light" band. Basically, your vision would work the same, just objects would likely have a different "brightness" to them.

Still Good

joejack: "But yeah, if I'm on win7 I still use winamp. I don't install video or modern skins or a lot of the other crap. Stays out of the way, low footprint, syncs playlists to portables, good hotkey support, great for ripping/reencoding, all the old plugins still work"

Which is exactly why I still use it. Global Hotkeys work great, even in full-screen ancient apps (think Diablo 2). The thing to love is startup time, low CPU use, and next to no memory footprint. Compare this vs Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, or (ugh) iTunes (to name a popular trio) and you feel better about running old-school.

99%....

99%? Let alone ones not using the ficticious data coming from a certain major climatology centre...?

Anyway, "might accelerate massively in a runaway positive feedback loop if global temperatures climb, and so become a major problem"

The world will quake in fear at a whole 2mm (guess based on only 0.25 coming from a major melt of Greenland) sea-level rise annually. Perhaps in 10 years, that one whole inch worth of extra sea-level will cover my sand castle....

Experience

5 years experience in 1yr-old tech is HR slapping their "minimum requirements" stamp on a job position, which is half the problem to begin with...

HOWEVER, the job posting usually lists experience in A CRAP TON of various softwares and (sometimes) languages, which sometimes is mutually exclusive in a workspace (VMWare, KVM, and Xen for instance). Then, of course, is the wage of 25-35k/year. So very much peanuts.

Open Source

The great thing about Open Source is that carriers could inject code directly into the kernel if they so deemed. Perhaps Carrier IQ already has such a patch readily available to their customers....

"think anyone gives a crap about what you are watching/listening to"

Twitter became a booming business for a reason, as gut-wrenching or mystifying as such a feat may be...

Missed

"The last time I read on the subject, SSD's built from current chips were expected to last many decades based on about 100,000 P/E cycles for commercially produced NAND chips"

There's a difference between referring to a "chip" as a whole, and what the OP to your comment was referring to: the erase-endurance of a particular 2-bit NAND cell, which does have 3000-5000 erase cycles at 25nm. However, when you take the whole drive into account (say 120GB), with decent wear leveling algorithms and such, it would take many years to burn through those erase cycles even pushing 7GB/day of data writes. And, of course, if you're using an SSD to edit uncompressed video or the like, you likely are a numpty or have enough money to toss your SSD once a year.

Faster Than Light Communication

Apparently, we already have. They likely did to...

http://www.universetoday.com/33752/device-makes-radio-waves-travel-faster-than-light/

Adverts

"Not that there's any difference between Google and MS and Apple. Except Apple will take $hundreds of you first and then extract advertising revenue from your data."

Apple doesn't really make much in adverts (yet). However, they do gouge the heck out of developers, which you then must pay for in (semi)inflated prices. Or you do could do what Apple intended all along and just use their sources (iTunes, iBook, The Daily).

iBooks

Per title. Need I say more?

Yep

"this is the first signal Earth has received from the probe since it launched on November 9"

Perhaps it was just running Windows and finally finished booting on the Atom processor they sent up in it.

Knew I should have put it on an SSD....

@dr2chase: Problem

"but it's a heck of a lot easier to cover out consumption if we first cut it by 50 or 75%"

The problem with people saying "we should just cut our usage in half!" doesn't understand why the automobile industry is growing. It's not that people's cars break down and they discard them to junk yards. It's that their children come of driving age and require a vehicle now as well. We've quite likely DRAMATICALLY reduced our consumption of various Bad Things (tm) on a per capita basis, but population growth likely shrouds such cut backs. Perhaps someone should give us per capita energy use, polution, etc, etc and trend that out rather than just spouting how many Googl-tons of CO2 pumped out by the human race each year....

/Mines the one with the bike lock key in the pocket.

TV Resolution

TV resolution has been lagging behind for quite a while. NTSC or PAL has had sub 640x480 quality since inception, however, most computers have had minimum of 640x480 since 1990. It wasn't until 720i and the like rolled along that we got anything better. The nice thing was the push for TVs to be 1080p (and LCD) that killed CRTs and improved computer resolution for the mainstream from the old 1280x1024 (at best) to a more default 1366x768 (cheapos) or the 1920x1080. Still not the optimal (for now) 1920x1200, but it is still better than what we had just in 2001.

Rooted

The Fire has been rooted. Install base Android on it. Easy.

Unclear

It's unclear whether "device" refers to the iPhone itself, or some chippery in it. Even if it is the iPhone itself, 2-4% must be common, since it is REQUIRED to fall within FRAND.

"Leather"

"Leather *and* lamb skin..?"

Yes, Leathered lamb skin. Leathering is a process (well, Tanning, but too many would think that means sunbathing...), and can be applied to many types of skins.

PETA

If anything, this shows something about PETA, in that everyone EXPECTED them to do stuff like this, thus had no problem believing their "joke."

@James

Next to none. It was 4 years ago we read about similar revolutionary battery tech and was also compared to Li-on batteries. Why don't such techs make it to mainstream? They're expensive to replicate. Didn't we have flat-panel displays on trash-bag plastic that could be rolled inside of a pen and used on the beach a few years back? Yeah, didn't get far either.

Furthermore

"Tau of Unix" is actually "Tao" or variously "Dao" (which is still incorrect, but closer to the pronunciation).

As to why they're starting to integrate rather than run in pieces? They have to compete against highly-integrated competitors (Apple and Windows). If they continue to toss Joe User's usage habits to the wayside, they won't appeal to the general desktop market, and get drop-kicked like ChromeOS. Next you'll see MyFaceTwitSpaceBook notifications and email rolled up into the chat/IM to make a "unified messenger" utility in the status bar.

Mozilla

Because Mozilla made their "welcome to Firefox" start page display info about this Act.

In other news, what will Tankspot do without Project Marmot???

@Alan

"...simply because I can expect driver updates on zero day release for major titiles, and, well just superb regular updates in-between"

There's a problem with that. AMD releases gfx driver updates monthly (consistantly), with beta builds available (and well announced) for zero-day games. nVidia releases new drivers less frequently, about once every 2-3 months. Not sure on zero-day, but I'm sure they do "beta" builds for new games too. I've just been in the Radeon camp for a while.

Android trunk

@Giles

Android is Open Source. Yes, not Open Development because Google codes it. However, we are free, at any time, to FORK the code if we so choose. Look at CyanogenMod. If someone started hacking around with iOS and decompiling the code and rebuilding parts of it to making some frankenPhone (ignore the complexity of such due to iOS being closed source), they'd get shot with lawsuits. Not so for CyanogenMod and anyone else who wants to give it a go.

Android itself is Open Source. Releasing the code for ICS the day before the Nexus release (they original slated it for a few weeks after from what I understand) is a good step forward for them. At least they're "don't be evil" mantra seems to hold more true than in the iFandom.

E=Mc^2

"Do we *know* that matter anti-matter collision results in a bang?"

That is all.

Simpler

Just upload a bit of code (oh yes, code...silly command line person you) that do all the if (fail) then exit() checking on the craft. Then it's a simple bit of sending the commands all at once and let the craft fail out if any commands do not successfully execute or have a status failure. This includes the code to revert to original state if required.

See? A bit of a burst, but surely not requiring the 28hr round-trip per command line.

Economics

Apparently someone missed Economics 101. Essentially, these projects create jobs, put money into circulation by buying materials et al. Slash these projects and people go jobless (think of how Lockhead-Martin is squirming with other private rocket startups on the horizon), industries that produce the materials for these projects flounder as no one wants to buy their stuff (who needs blast shielding designed for rocket tests anyway???), etc, etc.

Where the cuts need to go is in budget mishandlings (you know, the $200 for a pencil stuff) or the obvious war-related things (such as being at war to begin with). However, war historically has been the means of recovering/avoiding an economic crisis. It doesn't seem to help this time due to unprecidented bailouts.

In the Industry

For those who don't know, or don't have the position to know:

We use mainstream SSDs in our HP servers here. (well, half of them, we're transitioning slowly for obvious reasons). No SSD failures yet, and we've been running them for a year on our heavy-load production servers. The others are lighter-weight, so don't demand the I/O performance yet.

We've been "refreshing" our 3+yr desktops with little 50GB SSDs. Why not HDDs? Because we are replacing the disk drives currently in the machines as their performance tanks and internal error rates go up (which is usually a sign of immenent failure before SMART finds it). The machines run like night vs day, running the exact same image as the old machine had loaded. For the machines with <2GB of RAM, we drop in a bit of RAM and no need to refresh the hardware for another few years. Workers clamour for the old Core2duo (or a Pentium D in some [IT] humorous test-cases) rather than the newer quad-core 4GB+RAM machines. They just know "it's faster."

Failure rates among these desktop machines? None so far. Only been pushing them out for a year or so though (about when SSDs became viable price-wise for wide deployment). We now track new machines and have upgrade paths for them to get an SSD at their year-mark. Will we get failures? Sure. But we had terrible failure rates with the old spindle disks too (especially in our laptops).

So, you can argue about your MTBF assumptions, or reading a "4000 post forum!" which collects the disgruntled people who often repeat-post, and I'll continue deploying and being a satisfied SSD customer.

Old Computers

Take an old dual core system and slap an SSD in it and you'd think you had a new computer. If you have more than 2GB of RAM, you're even better off.

Hard drive supply hitting zero will likely cause the next couple of quarters to report very bad numbers.

The fact we're teetering on another economic decline doesn't help much either.

Drives

Scooped up the last 2TB WD Green drive from Best Buy (bleh) for $80USD last week. Cut it close on that one. :)

I'm just hoping this will cause component prices to drop since I plan on buying Ivy Bridge next year....

Powdered

In case you missed it, it is usually traded in powdered form as an aphrodesiac. Once again, sex sells.

@MrCheese

"We're not allow to bundle this but do visit our forum for instructions ;)"

Things like the Lame MP3 codec for encoding MP3 audio for instance falls into this category. The idea of converting to an MP3 (process and resulting file) are patented, therefore Linux technically can not ship a "free" OS and include such a feature. However, there are groups (such as Lame) that have reverse-engineered how to encode an MP3. These people did not steal the encoding code, nor know before-hand the process to get the job done as patented by the MPEG group. However, just as Apple can manage to patent a device with rounded corners, they can not even give their product away for free, except for "educational purposes." Thus is the state of patent law.

Perry brain-fart it seems

Perry brain-fart it seems. People have them. Unfortunately, his was televised. Shame the democrats aren't errecting another candidate to get the "not Obama" votes....

Apple

Yep. > /dev/null for them, just like The Reg's requests for comment or support for the AntennaGate issue.

Blizzard

"2019 is probably looking a good bet."

They'll announce it in 2019. It won't be finished until 2022.

Nuclear

You must also note that nuclear doesn't get subsidies to the extent that "green" windfarms and the like do. If you want to talk about "non profitable" nuclear, try looking at the windfarm books with the government subsidies taken away. Currently, with prospective gov't cost cuts to the renewable energies, we're starting to hear the cries of how unsustainable they truly are without gov't funding....