Posts by Justin Forder

Guitar-playing keys enable extremely thin keyboards

Re: What's the buzz?

"Drive voltage less than 150 volts" !!!

NASA releases stunning image of our universe's distant past

This is a tiny patch of the sky

...compared with the size of the full moon here:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/37/image/c/format/web_print/

Made for each other: liquid nitrogen and 1,500 ping-pong balls

Re: Lessons you remember

Thermite demo on the front bench resulting in droplets of molten iron being embedded in the chemistry lab ceiling is the one that sticks in my mind...

Here's another liquid nitrogen/water/dustbin experiment, this time with rubber ducks:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/exploding-liquid-nitrogen-where-does-the-energy-come-from/

Oracle v Google round-up: The show so far

Re: A couple of "really not corrects"

In court, Tim Lindholm said that he didn't mean that Google needed to get a license specifically from Sun.

Wall Street Journal: "Google Employee Testifies His Java Email Was Misinterpreted":

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/04/19/google-employee-testifies-his-java-email-was-misinterpreted/

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

IAEA reports the 2 to 6 sievert local exposure estimate

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

in the update for 27 March 2011, 03:00 UTC:

"For two of the three workers, significant skin contamination over their legs was confirmed. The Japanese authorities have stated that during medical examinations carried out at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in the Chiba Prefecture, the level of local exposure to the workers' legs was estimated to be between 2 and 6 sieverts.

While the patients did not require medical treatment, doctors decided to keep them in hospital and monitor their progress over coming days."

Note that this is local exposure, not whole body exposure.

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

The cat?

How did you know it was the cat? Especially when it happened 6 months before being noticed!

Seagate takes skinniest single platter to Vegas

Room there for SSD to bring it back up to 9.5mm

You suggest they will take the speed up to 7200rpm, and the size up to 320GB. For me, it would be far more interesting to get a normal-sized (9.5mm thick 2.5 inch) drive with, say, 80GB of MLC SSD (for OS and apps) and 250GB of 5400rpm HDD (for documents). That would give my laptop (early 2007 MacBook Pro, 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, 160GB disk) a new lease on life!

Fusion-io: It's off to work we go

Their press release

Is here: http://www.fusionio.com/PressDetails.php?id=96

and makes it clear that SMLC ('single mode level cell') is a technique built on top of MLC. It says:

SALT LAKE CITY – July 07, 2009 – Fusion-io today announced it has developed a new engineering technique for managing multi-level cell (MLC) flash technology, that combines the enterprise reliability of single-level cell (SLC) technology with the economical consumer-grade MLC flash. Fusion-io products utilizing this technology, called single mode level cell (SMLC), offer a cost-effective MLC-based solid-state solution with the endurance and performance of SLC at a much lower cost per gigabyte (GB). SMLC-based products from Fusion-io will be available starting this quarter.

The SMLC technology features bandwidth equal to SLC, with comparable endurance and write performance levels, at a cost that is substantially lower than traditional SLC solutions. Fusion-io products utilizing SMLC build on all of the innovation and reliability of the company's existing enterprise-class solid-state solutions, including its PCI Express-based form factor, chip-level redundancy and RAIDing, global wear leveling, advanced error correction and many other features beyond just performance leadership.

Fusion-io's SMLC serves as the foundation for an enterprise product line that is tailor-made for customers requiring greater performance or endurance than MLC can provide, at a lower price point than existing SLC solutions.

"Whatever the underlying logic, the fact remains that the straightforward cost of solid state storage is the number one impediment to its faster adoption," says Mark Peters of the Enterprise Strategy Group. "This new SMLC solution from Fusion-io is aimed at attacking that impediment while leaving the many other benefits of solid state untouched, and it extends the company's out-of-the-box innovative approach to building a next generation of storage."

"A viable MLC solution for enterprise organizations has up-to-now been limited by technical barriers associated with the medium's write performance, endurance and reliability," said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. "Our SMLC solution overcomes these roadblocks and provides organizations with another avenue for migrating to solid state performance and reliability, while helping mitigate concerns over cost to deploy."

SMLC will be available in both ioDrive and ioDrive Duo product lines supporting 160GB and 320GB, respectively. Other SMLC-based products will follow.

Acer 11.6in notebook-not-netbook demo'd on camera

re: Screen Res?

1366x768, according to Norwegian PC World:

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.idg.no%2Fpcworld%2Farticle127163.ece&sl=no&tl=en&history_state0=