You'll need to buy a new TV to take advantage of it, or perhaps there will be an option to buy a set-top box.

Newer TVs are soft upgradeable and often even come based on Linux. It really comes to whether the vendor wants it and whether there is memory/processor power spare. One fly in the ointment are the content providers who have been forcing more and more verification technology to protect between the decryption CI+ unit and the display.

You are quite right and WiFi GeoLocation tends to be more accurate than GSM based location services and unlike GPS, it will happily work indoors. Actually if you have Google Maps on your non-android mobile, it will work there too. It will even work with Google Latitude on your laptop.

Thanks for finding that at high definition. What that is a mind map. The kind of thing that you can do with programs like FreeMind or its closed source, commercial counterparts. Mind maps are an invaluable tool but the only place you would use it directly in a presentation is to show complexity.

Where it does get used, and quite legitimately too is for planning. You can even have it up on a screen while you are doing it.

Graphviz is cool but I prefer FreeMind (opensource mindmapping tool).

To give an example. I was running a futures an options exchange network. I had enough passwords to cut right through the security. However also being somewhat of a security geek, I organized a scheme whereby I was not the only password holder and that the boss of the exchange technical department held onto the passwords in a sealed envelope in a safe. If emergency access was needed, the envelope would be passed to someone competent, who would then be responsible. As I was also responsible for the random password generation/distribution script for the routers, there were times when I was the only person who knew the passwords - but I did my damndest to minimize the exposure.

Very good point - military jet engines are much higher performance but the engines on a 777 aren't bad either. he key piece of information that was missing from the reports by the airlines making test flights was what happened with the engines. I would hope that the engines were thoroughly examined after the test flights - but the CEOs definitely made their pronouncements before any inspection could have been completed.

Was the MOL actually dead before the design was set? I thought that due to the engineering complications, the shuttle was built a loooong time after the initial proposal and the USAF requirement was considered as a critical justification.

Nope, the MOL, an abandoned USAF project was a major driver - essentially a manned space reconnaissance facility. It also drove the flight profile which proved so difficult (single orbit and a large downrange flight capability to get back to the US). What put the MOL out of business was the humble CCD - no need to expose and recover photographic emulsion.

First although we started playing with Alpha about the same time as everyone else (after the second wave of workstations appeared), it didn't go anywhere near production for some time afterwards. In this time, not a lot happened to the hardware but the O/S and compilers stabilised a lot.

Ok, the standards for enterprise level stuff is quite different and a good deal more expensive whatever chip is on board. They tend to have (multiple) good power supplies, good distribution and excellent cooling.

Funnily enough, the lower level systems also seemed to work quite well for us (we developed on them) and used them as specialised intermediate servers). However we usually had headless workstations for that using X from PCs. In all cases though we were running OpenVMS and not Tru-64. The reasoning was that as our primary function was message/record orientated processing rather than byte streams, and VMS was very good at that.

Your hardware downtime does sound quite alarming, but I don't recall any worse reliability than with other hardware. None of the other big sites that I knew were reporting it either. The only real disadvantage was the Alpha's cost against Sparcs.

They don't have a power generation capability (last time I looked). They also don't have any consumers other than their own data centers. This actually puts them into a difficult position whereby they can be squeezed either side of the market.

Alphas weren't unreliable - they were running stock exchanges and other high availability systems and didn't fail. Some of the early compilers had issues but I should add we were using DEC C/C++, which was mostly the same compiler across both VMS and Tru64. The Alpha wasn't a forgiving architecture so if you made order assumptions, you could be disastrously wrong.

The issue isn't so much whether a ThinkPad will last a sixth of the time of a Toughbook but whether it will last the month. The problem with low level home-ruggedisation (covering up points of ingress) is that you screw with the cooling.

That was the sad thing about it - If they had produced an adult version of the OLPC - the things were intended for use in bush type conditions, from the daylight viewable LCD through to the construction of the keyboard and the ease of fixing.

Toughbooks are great but if you are looking for an outdoors machine without the budget of an oil company, i.e. a university doing field research then it can be a problem.

Should be upvoted more - many shops do this, sell a product at a nominally "low" price but then rely on add-ons like meteor-strike insurance or phantom "setup/calibration" fees. To the point they even try to scare customers or magically run out of stock.