Purpose

"The X-37B is a mysterious, black-funded robot shuttle that no-one knows the purpose of" - surely the people who run the project know what it's for?

Best analysis to date

Well done.

The rocket landed

... like with a parachute, so it can be reused or examined? Or like made a small crater?

$0.5M

I thought if you held a wafer with your bare hands in a normal room, it was by definition ruined and worthless. Those shiny things they show off are just the duds I reckon.

Pint due to the location, of course.

Random sequences

I reckon monkeys don't type randomly. I mean, the chance of getting SSSSSSSSS is rather more likely than getting ABCDEFGHI or hello there. Not all 9 character sequences are statistically equal, but if this experiment is using a pseudo-random number generator without any additional logic, to me, it's not sufficiently monkey-like in behaviour.

I don't have first experience of monkeys, though my brother once did when an escaped circus money locked himself in my brother's hotel room bathroom. Explaining that to reception was, er, interesting. I digress.

Unknown B8229 DRAM chip

You've got 16Kbits of this:

http://www.alldatasheet.com/view.jsp?Searchword=5290N-2

Logic chips near the RAM

It's the 74LS** chip numbers you should be looking at.

The K8241 = 74LS00 contains four 2-input NAND gates.

The K8243 = 74LS04 contains six inverters (NOT gates).

These are 5V TTL (transister transistor logic) lower-power Schottky chips. I used to play with them as a kid. Happy days, when some chips contained < 100 transistors!

Sir Clive, we owe you

Started at the age of 10 with an '81, followed by a ZX-Spectrum (the "big" one, 48K) a year later which I then used for six years.

This thing started my IT career and radically changed my life and those of many others. In a parallel universe someone else would have made the first popular UK low-cost machine, but Sir Clive actually did it in ours. Bravo.

Joy

Started with a 16KB ZX81 - yes I had a wobbly RAM-pack which we secured with a bit of wood and glue! Followed by 6 great years with a 48KB rubber-keyboard ZX Spectrum and Microdrive (90KB tape thing, not those IBM tiny hard disks, don't be silly).

Happy times indeed.

Other power savings

I imagine feeding the data from the GPU to the IGP in the Optimus solution also draws some power, I can't imagine DMI (being general purpose) is as efficient as a display port link.

X5570 L3 cache

The X5570's 8MB cache is a L3 cache, it has 4 x 256MB L2 caches plus smaller L1 caches.

100W?

From their website:

"For a single display panel or tile of 55 inch size the system consumes less than a single light bulb"

Even if that's 100W, it's not bad... note they say 'tile', so you can mosaic these things together. It would be a bit dishonest if they were talking about some 1kW halogen bulb :)

I doubt lasers need a vacuum, light travels better in air than free electrons!

@D@v3

Yes, it costs a lot to keep afloat. The orbit degrades due to air friction, even at that altitude, and if left to its' own devices it would impact... somewhere. Now 300 tonnes could well hurt if it impacted in the wrong place (much of it will survive re-entry), so when the day comes (hopefully not in 2015/16), it needs to be de-orbited in a controlled manner. Just like Mir was.

I don't understand why when it needs to be de-orbited that operation costs a lot, can't a Soyuz do the job?

Typo

"Windows malware strains dwarf Mac virus variants by several orders of magnitude"

- er nope, the other way around :)

No Atoms here

Nope, Larrabee is based on the good ol' Pentium P54C with some nice mods:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-larrabee-graphics,2253-4.html

Still, take an old Pentium chip, add some nice 512 bit vector stuff, clock it at... who knows, but more than 233MHz... then 32+ of them in parallel... it'll be nice.

New el Reg units

I second the call to add this to the standard el Reg weights and measures system.

Pounds, dollars

Is the X5550 really £958 and not $958? :)

Steve because he shipped them 1st.

Are you sure?

"Windows 7, the planned predecessor to Windows Vista" - you really sure you mean predecessor? :) That could explain a lot...

@Tony, repartitioning

I'm a happy iPartition user, it does the job without needing to buy a new external disk. I have no affiliation btw other than being a happy punter.

Java

Why was I not surprised that you work with Java? Been developing in Java for 12 years, seen it all. Ick.

Nope, not a 40% discount

Tiger was $129, as is Leopard. Tiger family pack (5 licenses) was $199, same as the Leopard family pack.

Even OS X Server is the same price, at least in dollars.

Riiiiigh

So they're using open source infrastructure, web-servers etc, but the results only work (more or less) on Internet Explorer. So I guess that's ok then?

I dispair.