Re: On the plus side

@Matt Bryant

The court case is only almost over.

I'm sure that it is no coincidence that Intel waited until the appeal was denied before dropping this little bombshell.

Still, the next phase is where HP makes it's case for damages. I imagine that will be harder to pin any blame on Larry when Intel has clearly screwed HP as he claimed they would.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/01/oracle_loses_hp_itanium_appeal/

The last laugh may still be Larry's, I think!

Inadequate (you said it)

Here http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/23/apple_ipad_mini_lacks_retina_display/ you ding the similarly sized display iPad mini for having a 1024x768 display as unsuitable for use as an eReader.

I am suspecting 1024x758 is a typo' too, though I could be wrong.

UltraViolet, classic bait and switch

Ultraviolet according to an industry puppet -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/08/ultraviolet_uk_launch_for_boxing_day_we_kick_the_tyres/

"...through UltraViolet, punters will buy a universal, lifetime right to watch a movie in any format they want; it may be streamed to any device from the cloud, or downloaded to any device..."

The reality -

https://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81514/

...Alas, my hopes were dashed when I finally looked at UltraViolet's fine print. Instead of "owning" an Internet-capable copy of my movie or TV series, all I really get is a license which includes, "streaming from the selling UltraViolet Retailer, at no extra charge above the original content purchase price, for at least one year after purchase. This no-extra-charge streaming will be offered to specific apps/devices, and via streaming means, to be determined by the selling UltraViolet Retailer. Streaming of a given title from the selling UltraViolet Retailer more than a year after its purchase, or at any time via Streaming Services other than the selling UltraViolet Retailer, may incur fees and if so any such fees would be presented to the consumer in advance of streaming titles, with the consumer having the option to accept the fees or not use that Streaming Service..."

...and it goes on with more of the same.

Not sure about 4GB being enough

When we got to 4GB memory growth in desktop PCs pretty much stopped, although a few boards support more.

The thing is the OS makers never set a definite 64-bit goal and stop supporting 32-bit.

Consequently, developers for the most part never made the move to 64 bit, comfortable in the little 4GB world where they could feel accomplished making use of *all* that memory.

I have a nasty feeling that as a consequence we are living in a stunted world of software that would be very different, if only the OS guys had mandated 64-bit desktops instead of them being used by a relative few heavy media types.

And of course, with no reference, we will never know for sure that this isn't true.

But if you extrapolated the growth of PC memory size before we got to 4GB (probably logarithmic growth too!), I wonder where we should be now?

If anybody finds a plot...

It belongs to Microsoft. Yeah Office is what everyone has been waiting for, the tablet is obviously ideal for all that text and numeric entry.

I'm off right now to patent little home key bumps on the LCD over the virtual keyboard, I'll make a fortune from all the office workers needing displays with MY invention.

Timey Wimey!

"just weeks after being placed into voluntary administration less than a fortnight ago." Really? How?

Been there, Done that

I remember back in 1981 how "The Last One' program generator program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29) made all us programmers obsolete.

Oh, wait...

That doesn't read right

Maybe "But Google's own list was arguably worse." should be "But Oracle's own list was arguably worse."?

Found it

It's just a 9MB doc in the whole USB 3 spec zip - http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/usb_30_spec_071012.zip

The link is just a summary

Just 2 pages, do you have a link for the full thing?

Fortunately...

Here in Aus' our banks and big companies will be well protected by our skilled programmers.

Oh, wait, we outsourced all that to India, China etc', guess it's good that we totally trust them never to turn on us then.

My sympathy gauge [E\ . . . .F]

measure first, fix later

I would think the best first step would be to allocate a port number and have it agreed that all traffic on that port will bypass the buffers, bar sending after the in-progress packet of course. Then internal and external systems could easily get a true measurement of the situation.

fixative fixed

I agree it looks like it should be "70 per cent of all the shipped petabytes were HDDs" but 25GB of flash may well be enough for 95% hit rate on 5,000 GB (5TB) compared to the measly MBs used in drive RAM caches today.

It's only a wrinkle on an old idea

Prof' Green was doing sculptured surfaces on Solar Cells to capture more light YEARS ago at UNSW - http://www.greensolargroup.com/index.php?url=/default/page/118

Looks like a bid to be relevant in the modern world

What's the betting you can't opt out of Windows Store and having a Microsoft Account at install?

Just so they know

Nothing less than fibre to each and every home and business premises will actually satisfy me.

There's their starting point at 100mbps.

wake me up

When they get around to motor vehicles.

Political problems aside

And disregarding the 'Viking may have found life' BS.

#1 A good nuclear power plant, you can do a lot more work and building with reliable power.

Even when it is old it will probably still be possible to extract useable heat for the habitat from it.

#2 Geophones and a drilling rig. If Oil is non-biological in nature (which I doubt, but you never know) then maybe they can find some and a whole lot of Earth dependencies fade away.

If there is no Life or Oil on the planet then we might consider the theory dis-proven.

At least they might be able to look for underground water with the rig.

I doubt there will be any ecosystem to worry about these two items disrupting.

With the right computer model and 'analysis'...

I'm sure they could prove that the descent rockets of our Mars probes are responsible for man-made global warming on Mars.

(I think the the sub-word 'anal' is a clue that most 'analysis' produces crap)

That brought back memoeries...

of coding Sweet-16 on the Apple ][. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

The kids will find probably it fun but I'm well over writing Assembly now.

You should read The Register...

And save yourself writing half an article.

And save yourself writing half an article. (joke)

Tethering restrictions bypassed in html5 for Blackberry, Android and iPhone

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/12/tethering_iphone/

http://tether.com/tether-relaunches-iphone

Oopsie

Sorry about my previous post about CSIRO working with the US on separation, it was ANSTO!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/rare-element-commences-separation-testing-and-heavy-rare-earth-testing-2012-03-15?reflink=MW_news_stmp

"Rare Element Resources Ltd. announces that it has entered into an agreement with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) to develop and test a process to produce separated rare earth (RE) products from concentrates derived from ore material at the Bear Lodge project, Wyoming."

Dear China...

Here's mud in your eye! (Deep Sea mud)

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/deep-sea-mud-possible-source-of-rare-earth-minerals.htm

Somebody at Australian Geographic was ahead of the game in July 2011 :-)

that 97 per cent global share

Is only market share, I think they have about 38% of the global supply of the so-call rare-earths.

Australia has about a third of the world's supply too, I believe.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=rare+earth+deposits+australia

We're already ramping up production and CSIRO is collaborating with the US on new extraction processes.

http://www.australianrareearths.com/

If only we will actually have a government smart enough to make things using the resources instead of shipping them cheap by the ton for a quick buck, fat chance I know!

did you notice

A couple of posters here converted the legacy Degrees Farenheit measurements to Centigrade, I would have expected an Aussie journo' to actually do that automatically.

It's just such a bother looking it up https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=116f+to+celsius :-)

I'll answer that

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25116/what-follows-next-in-the-sequence-unary-binary-ternary

But they don't have 'Trinary' in their lists so how reliable are they? ;-)

By definition

A binary quantity can only have one of two values not "0, 1, 10 or 11".

Who knows what the approved name of a variable with four possible values is?

I know trinary is three, but does a four value variable follow Greek or Roman naming?

I wonder...

What stories Mike Daisey tells the tax man? He obviously doesn't have a problem bending the truth and making shit up to make money, why would he do different to keep it?

Judging by Steve Wozniak's examples...

The problem is that they have compromised the service to put the other A.I. first, Advertising Income!

Haven't heard of them in over 40 years

If you like a good read, I can recommend Arthur Grimble's "A Pattern Of Islands" which was just republished last year.

http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Islands-Arthur-Grimble/dp/1906011451

It will be a shame if that's all that's left to remember them by though.

the obvious impact

"...politicians have begun meeting with FSU members to hear first hand the impact of job slashing and offshoring."

That's easy, the poor pay bugger all taxes, the rich and big companies pay minimal taxes, only skilled middle-income people and small businesses keep the country running and politicians in a job with a comfy pension at the end of it.

Get rid of middle-income jobs and prepare to suffer, you clueless pollies.

Not that politicians have that much business sense (or any other) these days, after all, there's no minimum qualifications to run the country is there?

Fixed cost for wafers...

Sounds like a bad idea for a foundry that can't deliver a decent yield on working 32 and 28nm devices.

Surely you'd want to pay by the working chip delivered to encourage them to lift their game?