-blink-

They don't remember the old days where having the keyboard and motherboard on the same box meant the cables in back pulled out after a few ergonomic adjustments. There was a dreaded and familiar chirp as the switching power supply strained to draw the last joule from the capacitors. Unlike the Apple ][, the Gecko doesn't have a platform for a heavy color CRT to pin it to the desk.

Speaking of being pinned down, wouldn't this have a hard time competing with newer cellphones?

Evil gets its mojo back

Considering rumors about the next US iPhone carrier, the fight between Microsoft versus Apple is back and the battleground is Verizon. Hopefully the loot from the Bing deal pays for the damage caused by being a battleground.

Another?

I think the market is saturated before these hit the streets. Until charging and range problems are solved, all of these e-cars need a tiny diesel charging generator. Nothing big like the Volt - just something that can quietly work while the car is parked outside. As a generator, the diesel motor could operate at peak efficiency and take advantage of emissions controls that require high temperature exhaust. When close to home the generator won't be needed at all.

I don't see any environmental friendliness in needing to buy one long-range car and one short-range car.

C is for Cookie

Flashing and screaming ads aren't Google's thing. It's all about monitoring, data collection, and power. I bet Google does some Evil when a Chrome package comes out that can block the whole Google family of monitoring services.

Good reputation

Keep it flowing, US District Court of Eastern Texas. Surely there are many lawyers working on proving that there's a clear and unjust bias favoring patent trolls, abuse of the patent system, and abuse of the legal system. Victims of fraudulent patent claims will all show up to claim reimbursement. Lawyers will ravage your land like horrific apocalyptic swarms of... um... lawyers.

RF pimp

How is another 150MHz of spectrum going to give everybody fast broadband? Even if mankind invented a holographic electromagnetic modulation that improved efficiency 1000x... Well, high performance fiber optics are here now and the telcos aren't rushing to deliver that. Levine and Kirjner saying that we shouldn't rely on new tech says a lot about US bandwidth plans.

Why steal the bandwidth from broadcast TV? Because everyone uses cable TV instead? Cable TV coax has far more bandwidth yet customers receive a few megabits and threats of disconnection for abusive utilization.

The way the FCC does their job, "the country that has the best broadcast TV in the world" is too lofty of a target. All of those $40 DTV upgrade coupons exempted high-definition tuners, thereby ensuring that antiquated MPEG2 streams will encumber our airwaves for as long as the old copper wires trickle data to our homes.

Self-defeating

The more widely a content filter is used, the more spammers will know how to avoid it. Bot armies have no or little costs to operate and they can parallelize attacks on these filters trivially. Has spam gone away because of these filters? No. Will a theoretical 99.89% accuracy make any difference? No. Filtering mail by content encourages networks to do nothing about their compromised systems. Spamming will increase as needed to compensate. The only end result is that everything is running a lot slower than it should, with resources wasted on a massive invisible battle that can have no victory.

Change the filters to block by network ownership and suddenly there's an incentive to keep customers clean.

Panasonic and the missing asterisk

Give that Panasonic a better test before listing its technical capabilities. I have a Panasonic TC-P50V10 TV that claims MPEG2 and AVCHD playback in its specifications. It's a lie. Panasonic support said it plays files from SDHC cards that were directly created by a Sony or Panasonic video camera. It does not support video files that come from a computer, another brand of camera, or files that are copied to the SDHC card. In other words, it doesn't support MPEG2 or AVCHD.

Audiophile

This device should be resurrected as a giant jukebox. Any fool can have a $15000 of tubes and gold-plated transformers amplifying their music, but how many can claim that a gas tube reads and writes their digital media on archival film through the purity of a vacuum? MP3s would sound WAY better.

Game Over

So the next terrorist attack on NY will be hacking the Xbox emergency alert system. There'd be a large army of semi-capable and highly gullible people at the command of one person controlling the glowing 16:9 rectangle.

Tomorrow's roads will eat your car

Based on trends in government budget management, I predict that the asphalt of tomorrow will have bigger, more futuristic potholes and hefty chunks of nanofabric patchwork breaking loose in the rain. Why the fixation with tiny wheels on future cars? Why can't they just hover?

@AG

MacOS X has such a GUI. It requests the username and password of somebody with the proper privileges. It can be yourself if you're an admin, root, or a completely different account. It allows administration of a machine without having to log out of a low-privileges account.

And the audio?

I hope that box passes raw digital audio through the HDMI port. All I see in the specs is "2.1" audio output. That would be very unimpressive in a home entertainment system.

Drawing a blank

The one and only Vinton Gray Cerf said this? The Stanford and UCLA grad, DARPA computer scientist behind TCP/IP technology, builder of early internet systems, and Google evangelist? I guess that name is supposed to ring a bell but I really don't know who he is.

Just hit delete

How about a pair of goggles welded to his head that show pop-up ads and plug his ears at random intervals. He then has to press a 'delete' button to regain sight and hearing. Maybe he has to hit delete 100 times in a row sometimes, just like in the old Cyberpromo days. The goggles can come off when he pays all the spam fines.

Need a backhoe icon

It's amazing that anybody still accepts mail from Nigeria. For me, fake telco contacts = firewall.

For small high power devices?

As devices get smaller and smaller, how is that USB 3 cable going to work well? It has more wires than Cat 6 and it's going to take a good amount of power to send 5Gbps down a long twisted pair. If USB 3.0 isn't targeting small devices, it has strong competition from existing cable designs. I can see why Intel would want to skip USB 3 and work on its successor.

Solving yesterday's problems with today's technology tomorrow

"...net neutrality regulations could prevent web providers from offering US customers advanced and well-managed networks."

But what has been preventing providers from doing that for the past 10 years?

Superior 290x250 video resolution

Time to bring back the old Betamax analogies. Apple keeps talking about openness but they only implement it one way. I know they're trying to fight competition but the same tactics scare me away from relying too much on Apple hardware and software. It took me only a few DRM purchases and one buggy iTunes update to realize that getting locked into the iTunes/iPod/iTV setup would be a disaster.

MPC

What's the miles-per-corpse of a jet? Is there a corpse guzzler tax? Credits for introducing new corpses into the biofuel pool? Corpse-neutral status if burn=kill?

Smog

Customers run their buggy web sites in Amazon's cloud and they get hijacked. I've had numerous dictionary attacks against my home computer come from within Amazon's cloud. Amazon's slow response time to those too has earned them a spot in the firewall.

Fight sci-fi with sci-fi

Bring on the ablative armor. Something that absorbs a lot of heat in boiling and produces a lot of dark ash in burning would hold off these momentary bursts of energy without weighing too much. A liquid wicking through a porous surface could even solidify over burns to heal them. The defenses seem to be a lot simpler than building a bigger laser.

I have my safety goggles on.

I smell bacon

Reaching around the back of your TV to find that elusive power plug could, one day, fry your hand.

Brilliant

This is good news. I thought the USB 3.0 spec was a hoax until I saw that it was getting backing. A new cable physically on top of the old cable? Seriously? If Light Peak is Apple's idea, giving it to Intel to promote is the right thing to do. Intel has credibility and willingness to work with many manufacturers. Apple/Jobs, not so much.

Equality

I'll help restore the balance by reading the Reg for a while.

iSmashedItOpen

"milliamp hours per hour" - More sane people would just say, "milliamps."

Cleaning ears

The streaming is probably in AAC or AAC-HE. Unlike MP3, which squeals at every moment of insufficient bandwidth, AAC does an incredible job of hiding its damage. You often don't know what you're missing until you have the original for comparison.

I think Steve likes to dangle perfection in front of everybody but let nobody have it. Apple products are brilliant, beautiful, innovative, and always have a major shortcoming so glaring that it seems intentional. Now it's all the music you want all the time, but with crippled sound.

Guess what we did to your laptop...

I wouldn't be laughing like that unless I was installing Windows 7 on somebody else's computer.

Very soon

Will this technology be making its debut on flying cars? I think the real product here is the $50 document.

24V - not!

Servers racks running from 24V would need to be connected not with plug-in jacks, but with copper bars bolted together. Watts = V x A and wire losses are I x R^2. Cutting the voltage to 10% would make the current 10x higher and make the losses 10x higher even when 10x copper is used.

The losses in switching power supplies is mostly proportional to the current so most of the losses are on the low voltage side, not the high voltage side.

Not dynamic?

Mr. Jobs has always taken pride at the speed in which OS X boots and launches applications. As far as can tell from online technical documents, that is done using caching and pre-linking tricks that make address randomization impossible.

Tinfoil

If they're doing this right, the pulse dV/dT be so high that the EM field created upon impact with a small conducting suit would still knock you out. Larger suits would work.

Bigger is better

It's a silhouette of a man lugging a giant inductive charger. Or maybe that's a tumor on his back from leaking EM fields.

I went looking for trouble...

My first thought when I read this was, "Type O Negative."

Pirates to the rescue

Better pack some flares for the maiden voyage where it well be discovered that paddle wheels don't work when they're completely under water.

XML bites

XML is flawed in that there's no standard for storing untrusted data. CDATA is trivial to break out of. Escaping '<', '>', and '&' is common but wrong. Even with proper escaping, most parsers can't handle binary data. Base 64 is safe but it's huge. Then there's the character encoding issue. The encoding is stated in the encoded file itself! The file has to be read once in ASCII then re-read with the correct character set. In the rush to meet deadlines and avoid compatibility problems, most coders ignore the issues.

CLICK-CLICK-CLICK

Apple always loved the one-button mouse, no matter how outdated it was. Even when OS X started to need a multi-button mouse, they stuck with one button and added a carpel tunnel shredding finger position sensor. Now is their chance to create the one button laptop.

Smell my cleats

I'm most impressed with technology in the diagram depicting the virtual 3D image being larger than the TV set.

Combo Stop/Refresh/Go Button

Buttons that change function without user action are a hassle. For example, you want to stop but the page finishes and you click reload by accident.

Stone age

CD-Rs for archiving? Who wants warehouses full of CDs?

It happened to stone tablets, parchment, paper, and floppies. How many stone tablets and parchments are still around? Virtually none. The cost of storing an ever increasing amount of media becomes too great and the media gets thrown out on the next budget crisis. If you want to keep data forever, it needs to be on a highly redundant storage system that's regularly maintained and upgraded to improve its density. There's no other way to maintain a growing archive for very long time periods.

And the upside?

It's more expensive, much more complex, less of a performer, and it's only 30% more efficient? Maybe 26 MPG versus 20 MPG? I'm not seeing the upside. The real efficiency comes from the different engine design. The electric system is so weak that it might not even haul its own weight. When the electric system isn't running, it's just deadweight to use more gas. Luxury hybrids are a marketing gimmick to keep people upgrading their car even though actual solutions are still years away.

How the databases are being used?

When a CEO of a failing company has 12 million shares of stock that could be worth $0.003 each if he uses the data ethically, or $15 each if he screws everybody and their family... Has everybody forgotten the dot-bombs of 10 years ago? Ah, Sutherland worked with the government. No chance of corruption there.

On your left you'll see...

+1 point for a design that's not claustrophobic.

Epic fail for aesthetics, suspension, aerodynamics, safety, comfort, privacy, personal freedom, and not realizing that amusement park trams suck. The design studio only needs to add a beanbag and detachable scooter to the design to complete their dot-bomb failure.

Videos are OK to steal

If MP3s were involved, Google would be fined for trillions of dollars.

Smaller than potato battery

A zinc-manganese battery? Really? That's the ancient "Super Heavy Duty" battery that every electronics device recommends against using because of the low current output, low power density, leak risk, and high self-discharge.

Fraunhofer Research says it would be good for bank cards. Do I detect sarcasm there?

Hot steamy update available

If Green Dam is so warez that it's still fetching updates from Solid Oak, there seem to be many solutions available. As many solutions as there are types of banned content.

The 1%

I was thinking that maybe Apple fixed the limp screens and I can buy a 15" laptop for work and play. Nope. They got rid of the ExpressCard where I'd need to plug in a cell modem.

Buy a USB modem and Velcro it to the side when not in use? No thanks. Buy a cellphone and tether it? Even more clunky.