Some people have a knack of cracking their screen. Pockets, people!

I'm a clumsy oaf but the only time I've dropped a phone on pavement was texting-while-dogwalking, itself a dangerous activity when fido yanked at the lead.

Very handy when travelling and using a phone for photos instead of a fancy $1000 standalone camera.

Oops, my phone's battery is at 2%, I guess I won't be taking a selfie of the Taj Mahal this evening. :)

That means you have to now charge 2 devices overnight but with the high capacity ones having 10000 mAh or more, you can camp for a weekend without power.

Isn't that a goal of Google's Project Ara?

Who said anything about a mouse? People write with a whiteboard marker, or in its digital form, a stylus.

A number of years ago I worked for an organisation where people took notes in meetings using a Panasonic Toughbook. The software for the forthcoming Windows 10 is, hopefully, a lot more sophisticated than XP tablet edition as MS tune their software for touch/scribble.

soylent news readers (all 5000 of them!) were having a chuckle about that.

Slashcode is open source, from which the soylentils forked the code and have an active repository on github.

Meanwhile, the Slashdot website runs on an a bastardised version.

Not a fan of the mighty ducks trilogy? :)

How his brother Charlie ever became a star is a bigger mystery.

I think I prefer Steve Martin's The Man wth Two Brains.

Richard Nixon almost won an election with Bender's body.

I thought it was just a running gag for the MS Browser Engine story but it seems to have infected the rest of the site!

Yes, the current generation Silvermont Atoms are (I believe) all 64bit.

(You might still find prev-gen Saltwells in tablets and phones)

Intel won't kill off x86 entirely - they have their Quark project for Internet of Things.

The problem I was referring to is some Pentiums are Haswell based (core), while others are Silvermont based(atom).

Similarly, there exist both Core and Atom Celerons.

Please dump the Pentium and Celeron brands, which are relics from a bygone era.

Just call your brands either Core or Atom and be done with it.

Obfuscation doesn't help the consumer.

Just on the DC thing, I've been wondering how long those hybrid solar/AC external batteries hold a charge. Not the 5v micro-USB ones for phones but the $150 ones that have 12-19v DC out and 30000mAh capacity.

If the battery half life was decent, one could conceivably use that bushwalking - strap it onto one's rucksack by day. One could conceivably power a NUC and an LED screen.

Though hey there are tablets for such things but it'd be an interesting thought experiment.

you raise a good point but the NUC isn't a *desktop*. It's a small x86-64 box, not much bigger than a vhs cassette, that screws into the back of a monitor.

This is designed for large corporates with lots of cubicle monkeys for whom performance of those Core 2 Duos from 7 years ago was sufficient but they want to save a heap of money on electricity bills. These will be popular when adopting Windows 10. XP --> 10, HDD --> SSD and with better integrated graphics. Did I mention the energy savings?

Relax, you can still buy a performance smashing i7 residing in an enormous watercooled tower if you wish.

For about a third of the price of your shuttle, I bought the fanless Atom NUC. It's no workhorse but good for basic computing such as slashdot commenting! When I have some free time I'll load openelec and android-x86 on it.

It'd be perfect if Intel added a few extra cores - for 75% more I could have bought the dual core Celeron Brix (also fanless).

I'll definitely look at trading up to the forthcoming Braswell Brix or NUC. The Atom should have reasonable resale value and in the next 6 months I will have saved $AU40 on my power bills!

But yeah I'd be a big fan (pun intended) of a Shuttle at work in preference to a noisy beige tower or a laptop.