Posts by Tracy Nelson

Pimp my office: 10 cubicle comforts

I've been looking for one of those roller-slider things for years! I used to have an old GridPad laptop with one built-in, and it was hands-down (ha!) the best pointing device I've ever used. Now I'm crushed, as I'm not about to pop over 250 quid for one.

Reply-all email lightning storm STRIKES TWICE at Cisco

We had something like this happen once, but the original message had a .BMP file embedded -- all 8MB of it. And of course "reply all" conveniently included the original message. I think I only got five or six of those messages before the disks wedged tight.

Brew me up, bro: 11-year-old plans to make BEER IN SPACE

Re: I'm sure

Is that your final answer?

Hold the chips: Apple axes Samsung RAM order for iPhone 5

Re: TMSC, IBM and Global Foundry

| It's not as hard as you think to switch to an alternate fab.

Sure, if all you want is a sample run to verify your design. If you want someone who can do production runs with guaranteed quality and output levels, it's a bit more challenging. I doubt any of the manufacturers you listed have enough excess capacity on the required process to absorb Apple's demand.

Google officially buys Motorola, hits refresh on CEO

Re: opine

Dunno, most of the parents of children my daughter's age (9) have tablets or notebooks, while her school just dumped their ancient eMacs for a cartload of MacBooks. By the time she's in high school, I fully expect we'll be required to shell out for some standard laptop or tablet. Hell, she's already gotten into the habit of asking to borrow my phone if she wants to look up something while we're out of the house. My phone already supports external peripherals that can turn it into a pseudo-netbook, as phones get more powerful and cloud storage becomes more prevalent, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see low-end "tablets" that simply provide a bigger touch-screen and link to your phone over bluetooth.

Pininfarina B0 production schedule slips

Which standard would that be, then?

Charging from a "standard" wall socket in the US will probably take more than a few hours (say 15A max draw @ 120V). An appliance socket (30-50A @ 240V) maybe...

Should make for a nice garage heater, though!

Custom-car creator preps electric Porsche

100HP? Bah. Why not something like...

...the Mini with electric hubs (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/the_hybrid_mini.php)? 640HP, 0-100kph in 4.5 sec, 200-250 mile range on electric, what's not to love? Well, except maybe the lack of brakes (no mechanical braking, it's all done via the hub motors).

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 sub-notebook

re: Defrag SSD?

Spot on, Mr. Adler. Defragging is to reduce the number of seeks and individual disk reads. While I dare say it's possible that defragging an SSD might help by making burst transfers possible more often, the effect is probably negligible, and wholly insignificant when compared to the performance increase offered by the SSD over conventional disks.