By far

Drop the price down to a 200-range and put 32GB of flash in there instead of whatever HDD it's likely pimping, and it would be considerable. Could always stuff a USB-based HDMI port off the back too...

Go a step further

Not only would they not have a "members list," but they wouldn't likely log their (likely illegal) chats for the FBI, et al to find later. Black hats like these might be lacking some (hopefully) common social well-being characteristics, but they're by no means idiots. The 650 IP addresses is likely usernames and attached last-logon IPs at the worst, be it to the site, or just to IRC channels hosted on the server.

@Russell

Intel has already released the info on their Ivy Bridge sockets. Yep. Pin compatible with 1155. You could drop Ivy Bridge in a P67 mobo or a Sandy Bridge in the new 7-series chipset. (BIOS updates apply, as usual).

I guess they actually learned something about compatibility from AMD's AM socket. Although, I'd suggest doing your research before looking the fool by spouting based on your speculation. Perhaps you got suckered into buying a 1366 socket?

@ Sir Spoon

Even with a reduced presence, all they need is one correctly identified marker to shoot you down (both stealth and personal profile).

Unique IDs

"The point is Android sends a unique identifier. iOS doesn't no matter what settings you have enabled. Google shouldn't be allowing such information to be collected. Its obvious they do it to make another few bucks out of you."

The Unique ID is likely a quality-control mechanism. If a bunch of bogus data is sent from a single UID, they can purge their system by deleting all data from that UID. With the data not being tagged, there's no way for them to purge that bogus data, short of cross-validating (which they would have no way of knowing how many times said UID had reported). I would likely be a trivial matter to have your rooted 'droid spam thousands of bogus data packets, and without the UID, Google would only see it as a certain bit of data has been "upvoted" thousands of times, thus presumed to be accurate. This has plenty of bad connotations if abused. With UIDs (albeit potentially falsified, but easily blocked when checked against valid UIDs), it would be easy to spot such (single-UID) spam.

@Bullseyed

"If Anon did do it, there'd be no cause for alarm. Anon hacks things because they can (tm) and would not use or resell the personal information collected."

But it could be held for ransom.

True Costs

"But some of those Android tablets cost more than the iPad.

So cutting corners doesn't seem to significantly reduces the cost."

Don't forget also that Android tabs can do a significant bit more than a stock iPad2, without having to buy dongles. HDMI out and an SD card, to name two. Both dongles are fairly pricey for the iPad2. HDMI out I can see leaving off a tab in most uses, but the SD card is almost a necessity for content consumption (my music collection alone could easily fill an iPad2).

So, what is the cost of that ultra-cheap $500 iPad2 after the adapters, i*branded attachments, etc? Yes, the Galaxy Tab 7" is way overpriced, as is the Xoom for the most part. We'll see what Samsung delivers with their 8.9" and 10.1" models.

Cores

The IPad2 actually has 3 cores if you look at it from nVidia's viewpoint. The new Tegra chip has a dual-core ARM cpu and a dual-core GPU, all in the same SoC. The iPad2 has a dual-core ARM chip and a separate single-core GPU (albeit baked into the SoC I believe). Contrast that with the current desktop GPUs which are highly-parallel single-core CPUs. The move to dual-core likely gives it an entire core of extra Ooomph it can whip out when you load up a 3D game, but it can shut entirely off when it simply needs to handle your eBook reader interface. Power savings without (much) GPU performance sacrifice. Sounds good to me.

Justice

"take him off to Guantanamo Bay for "questioning" and issuing some "justice" under the pretence that he was already dead...."

This is simply lowering one's self to the level of those you're fighting against. Should the Allies have captured and put into extermination camps all Germans, simply because that's what they did to Jews in WWII? No. Ethics dictate that one would be held for crimes they committed and punished (executed for war crimes likely) in a humane way. Capturing a terrorist and torturing them for the sole relish of exacting some form of vengeance would make us no better than them.

The real rip-off

Even though the originals were "digitally remastered" and had extra CGI and such, there's still one problem with the Blu-Ray version: the original film was still shot in crappy standard-def. The video recording sucked then and will still be like up-converting a VHS to 1080p. Fortunately, the new Eps 1-3 may actually come out in better quality, but die-hard "I must have a blu-ray player due to the superior image" people will be woefully disappointed when they realize if it wasn't shot in high-def, you don't get high-def quality automagically from Blu-ray.

@Spoon

"I will never use facebook, but my wife does - so I banned her from mentioning me or including any photo's that I might be in :)"

Even though you put a :), I'm still inclined to believe you truly think you're shielding yourself. All you need to have done is a family member or friend of yours, that happens to have taken a picture of you, uploads said picture to Facebook, and then "tags" you and types in your name. You don't have to be a Facebook member to be manually tagged. If you are a member of Facebook, you at least get a courtesy notification that you have been tagged in a photo so you can delete said tag. As a non-member, you don't get such a privilege. Then the CIA could somehow *wink wink* get a hold of such tagged images and process you into some facial recognition database.

Welcome to the computer age. 1984 may not have been nearly accurate enough.

Agreed

And some additional maths too:

"That makes you suspicious, and then the numbers themselves are seriously weird: 64MB/sec for the 300GB card, 65MB/sec for the 600GB card and a near-derisory 19MB/sec for the 1.2TB card."

Assuming these are random 4k writes....

300GB drive: 64MB / 4K = 16384 IOPS

600GB drive: 65MB / 4K = 16640 IOPS

1.2TB drive: 19MB / 4K = 4864 IOPS

Yes, that 1.2TB drive is certainly very fishy. Likely, they quadruple-booked the flash channels on their cards. The older 1st-gen SandForce controllers (Sandforce SF-1565 cited in the article) could only drive 1 chip at a time per channel (not PCIe lanes, but the data channels to the chips, of which Sandforce only supports 8 per controller, hence 4 controllers per board in this design). The new 2nd-gen controllers can drive all chips in a channel simultaneously, so this bottleneck is/will be eliminated by bumping to a 2nd-gen controller (once they sell enough of these 1st-gen devices).

Just a note

"At least Mac users chose their OS"

Mac users get OSX. PC users get Windows. The choice of OS is what hardware you buy. Then there are the free-thinkers than can install Linux (or other OS) on either set of hardware just the same.

However, the difference is the cost of such hardware. The Core i7 system punted at the Apple Store costs a fair amount more than the Windows-laden Core i7 system punted at the local shop, even though the internals are (roughly) the same. It just depends on whether you want a white computer or an assorted-color/style one and don't mind having Windows (hopefully 7 at least) on it.

Even modern weapons....

Modern rapid "throw a metric tonne of lead down-field in three seconds" weapons have barrel heat issues too. The solution? Don't shoot as much, or swap barrels in-field (using oven mitts apparently). The new cobalt-based barrel should remedy this, and we'll see if they can find such a solution for lasers too. Until then, keep the shots to less than 1 per 3 seconds (or so :P)

Give it a year

"El Reg would like to point out that, if Seagate stayed with its 5-platter design, it could produce a single drive with an awesome 5TB capacity."

We won't see such a drive until they push out a 4-platter 4TB drive in a few months (once other drive manufacturers can [and do] put out 4TB drives). Then they'll likely trickle a 4.5TB and perhaps the 5TB drive. Right now, they'll make enough of a premium pitching the same 3TB capacity but at slightly less cost than competitors, and make a tidy profit.

"and, its statisticians having given up, "virtually countless hours of music"."

2.88MB per 3min song (128Kb/s bitrate), and assuming 5TB and not 5TiB:

5000000 / 2.88 = 1736111 (1.7 million) songs, or * 3 (minutes) = 5208333.33~ minutes, 86805.55 hours, ~3616.9 days, or ~9.93 years worth of audio. Hence why their stat people just gave up. It's not worth listing the number of MP3s anymore.

How much space is this in Libraries of Congress?

Overlooked

"Imagine the truly, gob-smackingly awful RAID-rebuild times of such horrible disk drives."

Yes, a massive 10TB disk spinning at 7200RPM will still take A LONG TIME to rebuild, even sequentially. However, this does not mean that we don't NEED the capacity. If the Gb/sqin increases, more data will flow under the heads per second at the same 7200rpm speed, thus improving the drive's potential sequential read/write speed. We saw this with the jump to PMR. Placing more read/write heads on the arm will further improve read/writes (yes, they plan on doing this, just don't remember the company....). However, assuming a mundane 100MB/s to a 5TB drive, that's still 13.88hrs to fill the drive.

Then there's SSDs. Flash chip density is only limited by the die shrink and how many chips (and channels) you want to stuff into a standard casing (2.5"/3.5" or PCIe card, etc). More channels = more performance (roughly), assuming the controller and drive interface can handle it. Eventually, it might become cheaper to litho (or the like) our storage space rather than BPM a platter, but the endurance of SSDs only gets worse as the die shrinks, hence the research into making nano-levers and the like for more resilient storage.

Is a spinning platter the way forward? Likely not. Is NAND flash? Most certainly not. There are other technologies in development that are likely going to carry us out of our current rust-disk rut and hold us by until the Next Big Thing comes along. Until then, the new 3-platter Seagate 3TB drives will be a welcome product, hopefully causing some 4-5TB drives to show up in the next year or so (not due to tech, as Seagate and simply make a 5-platter drive at any time, but due to the "I want your money" factor).

AC and more :)

From one who liked PoP and Silent Hill, more adaptations would be great.

"....including Assassin's Creed, Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell."

"Assassins Creed Lineage short movies" into a movie would be a good start. Ghost Recon, perhaps, but Splinter Cell would be great. :)

Tomb Raider wasn't too great, but still a decent show to watch in the Theater.

That and...

The Archos 32 has been out for some months now. I'm surprised it's taken this long for El Reg to report on it. I'd still go for their Archos 101 just for the size and screen, let alone the SD slot and all the other tablety goodness.

Abound

"My bet's on shared blame, fuck-ups abound."

Absolutely. The Rocket system claimed port-forwarded addresses to the unsecured DVR. Which means they likely had VPN capability. They likely had static IPs, since they would have no need to port-forward if they didn't know the IP to connect to. The simple solution was to set up VPN to the station and eliminate the need for port-forwarding from the internet at large. At the very least, they should have only allowed connections from the police station's IP range (yes, spoofing is a possibility, but it's still more secure than what was set up).

Not changing a default password on the DVR is simply crap pre-testing and validation/configuration. FAIL for that.

@Ilgaz

"NTFS has some interesting issues like, constant writes are almost guaranteed as it keeps updating last access etc. Not really into windows+ssd but that is what they said when I suggested ntfs on usb sticks."

Just a note about this comment. NTFS has "last access update" info in a file's metadata. However, WinXP can disable updating this (simple registry 0 to 1 change), and Vista/7 disables the update by default. Most of my WinXP tunings (such as this) have been made irrelevant in Win7. I use NTFS on my USB sticks simply due to the limitations of vfat.

I wonder

I'm surprised no one commented on:

"GoogleServer: Likely somewhere near 37.0625,-95.677068"

Yes, it's a real lat/long coord, purposely picked. Part of the joke that seems one step too far (having to look it up) to catch. :)

As for the battery-drain of a GPS, the previous commentator is correct: WiFi is intermittent, and can go several seconds (or longer even, depending on power saving mode and other software configs) between WiFi polling. GPS has to, nearly continuously, monitor and number-crunch streaming data from at least three (usually 4) satellites. (By "number-crunch" I mean calculate the satellite's current location via it's almanac of flight paths, update said almanac from satellite data [due to gravitational forces causing orbit shift], constantly adjust its internal quartz clock to account for inaccurate timing compared to atomic timekeeping, etc). This is orders of magnitude more intensive than processing a simple SSID beacon packet (and consequentially discarding all other unnecessary packets) during a finite window of time every few seconds (or more).

I'd prefer only a few days of local caching, or at the very least, having the cache purged (or securely "scrubbed" [which depending on the flash storage controller may be difficult]) when you disable location services. That way, if you're truly paranoid (or want to keep something from the snoopy <insert person/organization X here>) you can just flip the services off during/after and be fine. Now there's the pesky problem of potential records that cell towers can keep of what towers your SIM card has talked to and when.... Perhaps this is all a matter of just turning the phone off (pop the battery perhaps, just to be safe? Sorry iPhone users, you can't do this) so that you're "off grid" during your times of "required privacy."

Fences

Cloud computing is the "new thing" that can be a life saver in businesses. However, rare events like this outline just how much of your business you're risking. There are still several advantages to using a cloud service, especially for small businesses using outsourced IT or the like, but there's just no beating a local network setup with a competent IT staff (even if that staff is just one person). A smaller business can likely handle 30min of a server (even an entire VM host) being offline while a critical component is replaced (competent implies being smart enough to stock a spare part of non-redundant server hardware, if the risk assessment is high enough). Likely your ISP will have an outage before a cloud provider will have downtime, so if your local servers have less downtime than your ISP (fairly doable actually), you could be better off having a local setup. Disaster recovery you say? If your business burns to the ground, you run into the question of why you would need access to your servers anyway? Your competent IT staff would have an offsite backup from the day prior anyway, so access to data is there. Sure, you won't be able to bring all your systems back online and operating until you replace your server(s) (unless you have a very inventive IT staff), but with the "disaster" hobbling your place of business, such would not be required.

Money and skill are the primary game-stoppers for a decent local setup. Your budget can't afford the ideal redundancy, infrastructure, internet-connectivity, or staff that a cloud provider can. It really comes down to if you can afford the one-in-a-blue-moon Amazon-style snafu (with the potential loss of your data), or if you prefer to rely on your potentially less adequate DR plan.

Evil

Evil would be "Lets see where Jim in marketing has been going...." *punches in two locations (Jim's home and work) to pull up all UIDs that fit both criteria* ... *crunch crunch crunch* .... Computer dumps out the obvious handful or less of UIDs that have sipped both work and home WiFi/cell towers on a frequent basis... Ok, now pipe that UID into a mapper to show plots of where he's been. Oh look, the neighborhood strip club on Tuesdays....now where's his number. Perhaps he's willing to give us a pint on Tuesdays to keep it from the wife. Which is likely this other UID....

What is it REALLY being used for?

Phone: I'm -70db for wifi: ActionTek MAC: 00-03-04-94-90-30 (yes, fake MAC), Where am I?

GoogleServer: Likely somewhere near 37.0625,-95.677068

Phone to User: You are HERE --->

All without having to GPS (sucks battery) or actually works (if indoors or otherwise blocked). WiFi wardriving is quite low power since your antenna is technically only in receiving mode. It's sending signals that drains power. If this information is cached in advance, your phone wouldn't even have to talk to a googleserver (which is what Apple does).

As for the UID bit, it's likely to prevent people from crap-flooding their records. If they get sprayed with crap data from a single UID, they know they can just purge all data from that UID from the system. If they get sprayed with crap data from randomly-generated UIDs, they know they can disregard the RNG UIDs since they don't belong to an activated device. It's a quality assurance thing. Unfortunately, they don't purge the UID after X days/weeks/months, which is how I would have implemented the system. "Sure, we collect UIDs for data-integrity purposes, but we sanitize even those after 3 months when we have validated the quality of the associated data."

Not just that

But Xen is still immature in some ways. They just recently added memory ballooning and they STILL don't have a virtual network environment (VMWare has configurable VSwitches that support VLAN and the like). It's ridiculous to leave one server NIC empty just so your P2V machines can be given a NIC, but not exposed to the network prematurely. A detached VSwitch in VMWare solves this problem easily. Even allows for a completely isolated network all internal to the system. Another sign of ad-hoc immaturity? XenConvert: Makes a MS VDisk image of the machine, remounts that and /requires/ DHCP for a transfer VM to copy the contents of the mounted VDisk image (yes, it mounts it and requires you to enable auto driveletter assignment). In contrast, VMWare Converter images directly to the VM server and can resync changes post-copy. If Xen fixed these issues, I'd be more tempted to use it over ESXi.

Intel

Intel had just donated a boatload of server equipment. Perhaps they would be in a position to raid their petty cash for board meetings and keep SETI afloat? Of course, one could argue that if we did find "the signal," we'd have to be lucky enough we get something like in Contact: full instructions on how to get to them. Even in the movie, we STILL were simply told "your not alone" and "eventually" we'll be allowed to know more. The only real benefit SETI would have would be /potentially/ (very large stretch btw) uniting to make a global space program and development effort. We might even get Star Trek-style ships in 100 years with such motivation. At the current ESA and ObamaSA (formerly NASA) rate, we might reach the moon (again) by 2030. Maybe.

/where's the "I didn't vote for him" icon? (M.Python reference for those interested)

Fail

You do realize the photo is a cropped, shopped image right? The screen can have any size of bezel a manufacturer wants to put around it. The image is likely a in-car dash demo unit, not a tablet.

@"Payback time" people

"The average wind farm in the UK will pay back the energy used in its manufacture within six to eight months, this compares favourably with coal or nuclear power stations, which take about six months."

However, this is likely factoring in the subsidies payed out for deploying a windfarm "renewable" solution. Also not mentioned is the power generating capacity of said windfarms vs a coal plant. If the coal plant generates 5x the amount of power of a given windfarm, that's 5x capacity it's profiting off of. Stop subsidies and see how fast they switch to a "this is not even near economically feasible" mindset.

Requirements

It just means wall street needs some government (law) regulations to prevent the ability of selling something you don't already own (naked short selling). Selling off shares that you borrowed (loan) is "acceptable" however, since you took the responsibility for the loan. Would buy like borrowing $1 million at 3% interest and loaning it back out at 5% (think of a bank that offers savings accounts). However, writing sensational documents (false even) to cause a stock crash after having shorted stocks? Make it illegal. How to catch people? They sold X stocks just prior to the dump, and bought back X+y (y being an offset with intent to "hide" their practice) shortly after the dump. Especially telling if they recently borrowed the stock. A bit of regulatory overhead (logging who borrows what, in addition to who sells what), but would smooth out the problem. Or at the very least, make it harder to do.

Why to not Open Source Honeycomb at the moment:

"Given the grief that Google are getting trying to "open source" something as relatively simple as video compression it's no surprise that they are not promising to do the same for a much more complex product."

Sorry, but Video Compression is not "relatively simple." There are not many ways to do it, true. Most rely on keyframes and differentials from such over time. Now, HOW to come up with WHEN to put in a keyframe, and how to get the best, most compressed differentials is where most of the patents sit. This is where On2 has stepped gingerly (and it seems somewhat non-gingerly), to come up with good quality and better compression.

As for not Open Sourcing "a much more complex product" (Honeycomb), there's two good reasons: 1) They're requiring a non-fragmentation contract for their early adopters (Xoom, GalaxyTab [2.0]) and, 2) The code likely looks like crap. They would like to clean it up (remove copyright infringing/grey code???) before opening it up to public scrutiny. Their licensing model allows them to do this, and it is good for the market in the long run, even if it prevents us from getting Honeycomb tablets for under $300 that ship with resistive screens and build quality similar to a preschool glue project.

@OP: In addition

"Bugger the lot and do something sane like RHEL in the corporate world, or Ubuntu at home."

Let me put it this way: if software in the "corporate world" is having enough trouble being 100% able to do what it says on the tin (interface with a sigpad for instance), what makes you think switching to RHEL or Ubuntu will work better? Sure, a desk monkey could use LibreOffice (just explain to them the difference between that and OpenOffice....) to do spreadsheets, but what about their in-house Access database? Oh, need WINE now. Or perhaps a VM. Piece of Windows-only mission-critical software (that won't run in WINE [likely])? Yep, VM now. Or Terminal Services. Now what about 2000+ computer organization? Need the benefits of Group Policy management? How about those that can't find "My Documents" and are too dim to know what a "home" folder it? Hope you like talking on the phone, I see you needing to get down from your IT Director position just to help out the front-line help desk staff. Oh, that's right, you're not an IT Director in the first place.

/rant

Another Angle:

"Jobs reply: "Oh yes they do. We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false.""

Quick bit about Jobs' reply. Google tracks users web habits, and likely collects "anonymized" usage data (no different than Microsoft being able to determine which buttons in IE are used most often). Jobs is tracking a user's physical location indefinitely. Do they send it back to Cupertino? Likely not. The info circulating is not false, as anyone can pull up these specific files (depending on iOS version) and see for themselves. Jobs is a liar in this case.

If you have an iPhone for work (because you requested it over a blackberry for instance), then your work would have every right to have physical access to your device. They can see where you've been, even during off hours. This in itself is a violation of privacy plain and simple. You might as well have a tracker in your work-issued badge (which is likely in your glovebox perhaps?). You don't have to have something to hide for this to be a problem. There's a privacy uproar for internet browsing, so much so there's "Do Not Track" methods being implemented in browsers now. Simply put, there's no need to keep an indefinite log of location on a phone. The last few hours? Sure. "Take me home" or the like. But not "Show me where I went on vacation last year."

To Answer the questions....

1) Yes and No. SSD awareness is more of an operating system feature. Windows Vista/7, newer Linux versions (don't remember the kernel version number), and yes, even MacOSX (to some extent) recognize SSDs and behave differently (ie: pass TRIM commands to the drive). As far as MBR and the like, yes, works the same.

2) Read my #1 response.

3) It's not imperative, but definitely SSD-debilitating if your OS "defrags" your SSD regularly. Debilitating, meaning reduces lifespan (unnecessary writes) and can cause your drive to run in a "dirty" state, like an unTRIMed drive.

Best bet is to run a TRIM-capable SSD and OS, or at least have garbage collection capabilities for the SSD.

A few other notes:

1) Glad the author used a V+100 Kingston drive. Their older counterparts (the SSDNow 64GB and such non-V+100 drives) are horrific performers compared to other like-priced SSDs.

2) "There's just one fly in the ointment – the age of the upgradeable computer is vanishing." - I would just like to refute this concept outright. Most PC laptops come with easy component bays for hard drives and RAM. They're even making it /easier/ to access such components. It's the world of Apple that you are seeing the "upgradable computer" vanish. They go so far as to (attempt to) require Apple-branded marked-up SSDs (via drivers) to support TRIM. This quote is from the skewed perspective of an Apple user.

Re: g e

"On a Microsoft report of a Microsoft product?"

As stated before, a Microsoft report said IE10 was the fastest, so an independent developer (of JSON none-the-less) took his Javascript program and ran benchmarks on it that were independent of the DOM or browser APIs (likely full of just raw Javascript since it's a javascript debugger and analyzer, rather than looping <div> ID lookups and the like). His results concurred with Microsoft's findings.

Until....

Once software is written with 8+ cores in mind (note that many are simply dual-core or quad-core capable and gain no benefit from, say, an Phenom II X6), then we can have 16 cores. Currently, the better poke would be from a more capable pipeline and faster GHz. Hence why the Sandy Bridge parts are rather tasty....you can pump a 3.4GHz part to 4.6GHz reliably. Gives substantial performance gains across the board.

Hopefully ARM's entry into the low end (which will likely hurt AMD more than Intel btw), and AMD's potential (please say it's so!) counter-punch with Bulldozer, will cause Intel to innovate and stop holding it's punches. It likely has the ability to pull a Pentium-to-Core2 jump again, but is trickling out the performance gains due to lack of competition in the high-end. No sense playing all your cards at once, right?

Nah

Nah, FFS doesn't quite work as RTFA (A for Article, as opposed to the common "M" for Manual).

Security

Just full-encrypt the PlayBook and it might be able to play host to email. BBs get away with security via password, so why not a playbook?

"'iPad? well, we dont know if thats secure, and it needs itunes installed, and its too shiny'"

Apple has shown next to no interest in making the iPad a "secure" device. It's not in their market goals, but if corporate users insist on utilizing the iPad for work, it's the IT dept that suffers, having to work around the lack of security on the device.

Don't forget

There would also be a significant price bump since Apple would be out in the cold and any potential supplier would know that they could take Apple to the cleaners on pricing, just for the privilege of doing business with them. No deal? No products. Ouch. Shoe meet other foot.

Reading

"It should be strictly for government to person business for tax, health and benefits and not for general inquiries, monitoring / tracking or frivolous uses (e.g. lending libraries)."

In case you missed it, they're recommending it for online banking and the like too. It's supposed to be an "online identity" like Microsoft's Single Sign-on (LiveID) or the like. Once your username (email address likely?) and password is phished, logged, DB hacked, etc, your life is now an open book with access to any accounts in the system and government services.

As for the SSN bit, yes, Americans (mostly) do have it memorized. However, a hacker getting your SSN isn't going to get them into your bank account (without some social engineering at least...). Basically this online identity will exacerbate the problems we have with SSNs.

The government should invest more time into proper fraud protection schemes and less with helping end-users reduce password re-use with implementing a single password for everything. At least with password reuse, you don't have a convenient list of all the places you use said password. (yes, email would be a list, but if you lose your email account you're toast anyway).

Buy a few now

Get some F4s while you can, and sit on your hands for 2 years to see if Seagate incorporates Samsung reliability or if Spinpoint drives incorporate Seagate's "quality"... *sigh*

Statistics

If you notice, it's % of users. Therefore, if new accounts are created for people to host their iPhone snaps, it (by the very nature of percentile statistics) will cause other camera types to drop. Of note is that the Nokia camera is still increasing, even with the iPhone increase.

What should be shown? Number of users of each type. Of course this would expose their userbase count, but they could not display the numbers and simply give us a chart of "relative" camera use by user count. This will give us a true idea of which cameras are actually dwindling in use and which are increasing, having no bearing on each others numbers.

Statistic fail, merely for hype.

Ditto

I've been running F2, F3, and F4 drives for quite a while now. I also have an assortment of Seagate and WD, and a solitary Hitachi drive. Care to know which ones have failed? Two Seagate 320GB drives. That's all. Granted, they lasted nearly two years and their replacements have lasted another two years now. However, I do back them up quite regularly to my F4 drive....

Title

hypothesis: a proposition assumed as a premise in an argument

theory: a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

fact: something known to exist or to have happened

Therefore, "I believe there is no God" is not a statement of "fact" but, at best, could be considered a Theory. However, theory (or theorem for those maths people) is something at seems to work, but doesn't have definitive proof to make it a "law" or "fact." So, the statement then takes the actual role of "hypothesis" since there has been no supporting evidence for or against the existence of the beardy sky-man.

However, I think everyone is missing the point that a religious leader has denounced humankind's push to control the world around us and stated we should all give it up. This is definitely blind devotion if I've ever heard of it. Any (other) religious person would suggest beardy sky-man would want us to learn and grow in knowledge....or was that passage simply skipped over in bible study?

Problem

"considering that grandfather plots are approximately the third most hackneyed cliche in all of science fiction."

And the most misconstrued considering the alternate timeline theory to solve the grandfather paradox. Granted, time travel isn't called such by physicists, but "closed time-like loops"

PlayBook

Likely, the figured "PlayBook" would relate to (American) "football" and could be used in meetings and the like to suggest productivity and such (since the "playbook" has all your tactics and "plays"). Will it work that way? Likely not. Easier to say "It's a blackberry" and get instant "OOOoooo"s by your business associates. About the same as whipping out an iPad2 in a coffee shop will do.

As for the 350(insert your currency here) Honeycomb 10.1" tablet, my money will quickly follow yours. My requirements for a tablet worth my money will be: dual core, 1GB RAM+, 16GB onboard storage (apps and whatnot), SD slot (32GB+ capable) for videos/music/docs (flash stick replacement potential basically), and capacitive touchscreen (obviously) with a decent viewing angle (where every tablet [minus iPad2 and a single Android tablet] so far fails). I'd even be willing to sacrifice 3D game performance for better battery life (retaining video decode and the like of course).