We've all seen patents being thrown around too much recently and stifling companies. I've got a suspicion that most controller technology and design is now covered by patents. They're going to have to be very careful to avoid getting caught by any of these.

Looking at this I'd love for it to succeed, but as a geek in their target market I'm unlikely to be buying one. I've already got a media-pc and an android tablet, and why would I want one of these when the Xbox720 and (presumably) a PS4 are due in a year or 2,

I'm team lead for a technical team, BAU dress is jeans + polo shirt (all black). If a customer is due onsite then I'm wearing chinos and a shirt and tie,

All of my managers are in suits without ties. I'd wear mine more if I could still fit in to it.

Checkpoint bought out their firewall appliance business a while back, so where does this leave Nokia for their products? If they can't deliver a phone that the market wants then what is left to keep them in business?

Data cabling can burn a lot of calories and keep you very active running in new links, if you can tie that in with some basic network admin it's an ideal entry level position that will keep you fit until you're promoted enough to afford golf course membership.

Datacentres currently are estimated at consuming between 1.1% and 1.5% of the total power generated across the world. That's bigger than almost every other industry out there, heck that's bigger than quite a few medium-sized countries. With this sort of size then even a small percentage gain in efficiency makes a huge difference to costs. A modern datacentre has a yearly power bill of $10million or more, and so if you can find a way of doing the same processing using 2% less power - well those numbers suddenly start looking very good indeed when you realise the scale.

Personally I'm more excited about the new ARM servers that have been recently announced. For commodity type workloads they have a real chance to be a game changer in the amount of electricity needed to perform a task, and when the new 64-bit cores arrive then I can see them suddenly fitting a lot of strategies.

Disclaimer - I run a team responsible for all physical installations in a blue-chip datacentre

Like everyone else I'm going to be stuck waiting for the first build to try out. Key for me will be whether it supports the new 10-bit h.264 encoding. Seems like almost every player has issues - the only one that consistently works for me is mPlayer - and the softsub support support on that player still needs some work to bring it up to a desktop standard. Nice to see a release at least, especially considering that after the announcement that VLC is being ported to Android we're still to see a stable official VLC build on the store.

I did front-line tech support for a few years. This was back in the days of '95 and 2000 so things broke a lot more then than they do now. The team had a guy in it that wasn't interested at all in being a tech, he was just there to game the system and do the bare minimum. He used to check the job queue every day and take every mouse replacement or easy job on there to make his stats look good to the management without actually having to learn or do anything. Now some people would get frustrated at having a guy like that in a team, but to me he was perfect as it meant that I got more than my share of the interesting and downright weird problems to look at. Building relationships outside of the team trying to nail down the obscure stuff got me noticed and made my career.

From reading the 'popular science' explanations the Higgs field and Higgs Boson is what gives everything else mass. So if we can find a way of turning off' the interaction with the Higgs Field we suddenly remove all mass, inertia, weight etc. There are doubtless guys out there much smarter than I am who will be able to tell why this won't work, but if it does then it's our big stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and ultimately the stars.

With most modern CDs and DVDs they use an organic dye as the data medium. If the seal at the edge of the disk is not perfect the dye will oxidise and you will lose your data. Best bet is probably usb flash drives - they are so cheap you can just send the family a new one each year with a full set of all your pictures - current and historical. That way you also know that you have an offsite backup for the important stuff. I'd also recommend looking at a raid-1 setup for your local machine - with 2 drives mirrored you have that additional level of safety so that if your hard drive fails you don't lose everything (and yes I lost my entire mp3 and media collection due to a drive failure and then got wise afterwards).

Millipede have a US distributor list which could be a good starting point - http://millepede.com/distributor-list/usa/20856 For cable looms up the side of a rack they're perfect as you can break them by hand which means you don't risk snippers near live cables.

alternate product - http://millepede.com/

Disclaimer: I do this for a living I run a medium-sized datacentre, and my job is to plan new installations for anything from pizza-box servers to full mainframes. Here is a few lessons that I've learnt the hard way. Fighting human nature By nature people are lazy and interested in the quick fix. As soon as you compromise and let 1 'quick fix' through - it turns in to a production cable that you are then stuck with until it's time to decomission the system. Do not compromise - do it right the firs time, every time. Brady Labels These are the self-laminating wrap-round labels for cabling. Label everything with at a minimum the source and destination ports (along with a patch panel port if needed). This brings 2 major benefits - when it comes time to cable everything is already planned and so you just need to follow the labels, and secondly if there is ever a problem you don't spend hours tracing where each cable runs back to. Cable Ties Cable ties are fundamentally evil. Do not use cable ties. Wrapstrap is a better product (no affilitation with this product) - http://www.rapstrap.com/ Velcro Velcro is your friend. Buy in bulk. Keep a stock. At home I nail small 3" to 4" pieces at the back of each desk for instant cable management. Cable Lengths Check what lengths you can get from your supplier - you should have a stock of 1m to 4m patch leads at 50cm intervals as a minimum. Use the right lengths. Colour coding Establish a colour coding scheme and stick with it - colour code for primary and secondary networks, colour code for firewalls, colour code for management, colour code for uplinks to additional infrastructure. Colour coding is your best way of verifying and proving that you have full redundancy to each device. OCD is an occupational hazard Yes - the job will make you feel like you have premanent CDO (the letters should always be in alpabetical order) - but the first time you have a problem that you can solve in minutes instead of hours by following the general guidelines above you will be glad you have it.