This is no big deal. What they are talking about here is the additive cycles in a day and not worrying about the compensation process for that.

Some basics:

Anything connected to the 60Hz power is at 60HZ, You can not connect a 61Hz generator to the grid.
In addition, when you connect a generator to the grid, you have to adjust its phase, as you bring it on line.
If the phase angle does not line up you get you get into a "tug of war" between multiple generation sources and that doesn't work.

The sine wave coming out of one generator has to line up with the other sine waves from the other sine waves from the other generators.

60 cycles/sec X 60 sec/min X 60 mins/hour X 24 hours/day = 5.184E6 cycle/day

  What the article is talking about is the adjustment of the generating stations on the grid so that at the end of the day you get that exact number of cycles across the grid, not one more not one less. It is "really close" without tweaking but not exact.

It costs money to do those tweaks, to get the numbers on the money. That tweak right now really doesn't serve much purpose anymore.

Noting exciting, or interesting here, this is not Y2K nonsense, move along...

"most cheap consumer shit monitors the speed of at least the CPU fan and tends to freak out if a fan that is supposed to be there is either absent or performing substantially below expected speed"

Got it backwards - Since the Pentium 1, there has been thermal monitor diodes inside the CPU to monitor the silicon temperature. Fan speed was dialed up-down as a function of the temperature.

Cooling using fluid has been around for many years, This is so 1985.

Immersion of HDD? Thats a quick crash and burn. Except for specialty devices they are open to acquire external same air pressure, thru a sub-micron filter, yes! HDD are not the primary source of heat in a computer however.

I hope you are joking.

The 1GB drive was "the hot new thing" in 1993.
And that was a full size 3.5 " platter desktop HDD
2000X increase in storage density in 20 years.

If you are serious, then I can sugggest a course or two
at either UCSD's CMRR or Santa Clara University's magentic recording research programs.

"Seriously, how much "design" goes into a technology that has been around for 30+ years. You take a platter, mount it on a spindle, spin it, send the data through the same IO standard that has been around for 10 years. What f*cking design is involved? Hard drives ARE obsolete, they do not become obsolete after 3 - 6 months of design. If I open a hard drive in 2011, it looks exactly the same as one in 1990."

LOL! If I open up a microprocessor from 1985 it looks a lot like a microprocessor from 2011!
Funny thing, one works with a 20MHz clock and the other one works with a 2.5GHz clock. Do you want me to itemize all the other differences as well?

Lets see the list is huge, heres some reading for you:
http://www.disktrend.com/pdf/portrpkg.pdf
Thats from the perspective of the box, not what goes on inside of it.

Recording head technology:
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps129/Winter03/papers/grochowski-trends.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head

Vertical recording:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording

Read channel technology:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4169625/Hard-disk-drive-read-channels--a-must-for-perpendicular-recording

The list of things in servo mechanisms, ECC methods, magnetic media, read channels, spindle controls, embedded servo methods, read/write heads, plated recording media, Viterbi detection vs peak detection, signal processing, PRML channels, etc, etc are huge.

Well, I would say that you are not in semiconductors or magnetic storage.
A minor correction - the HDD is the fastest mechanical part of the computer.
====> mechanical========

Thing is - a SSD is limited by semiconductor density and the physics thereof.
FYI
-- the transistor right now sits at 13 atoms of silicon in length
-- the transistor right now has gate oxide thicknesses of 4 molecules of oxide

Shrinking transistors using fractional atoms and molecules are not going to happen.

Consequently, without some breakthrus in transistor technology getting higher densities
is going to not make great leaps. Some incremental improvements are still happening, but
until that breakthru happens, you are not going to have any miracles.

If somebody saw a new way to make storage reliable, fast, and cheap, they would be all over it.
If you come up with a SSD that can beat the HDD in volume/speed/cost/reliability you can get very rich very quick.

The HDD death has been predicted a few too many times...

Its still the cheapest storage with easy access out there.

Consolidation is not only expected, but somewhat necessary.
I spent 15 years in the HDD industry, and some things to understand:

- It takes roughly 70 people and 6-9 months to design and develop a new disk drive.
- product lifetime has been as short as 2 months and as long as 1 year.
- typical product lifetime is 3-6 months.
- A company needs to have multiple design teams doing multiple product designs phased for phased product releases.
If the product is late, its already obolete, and will not sell.
If the product is slightly behind the times, it will not sell.

Because of the above NRE expenses are huge, so margins or volumes have got to be huge, to make any money.
Margins went to nothing many years back, so the volumes need to be huge. Thus fewer players are the results of all that.

Because of the above, dozens of companies that used to make disk drives are now long gone.

All of that said, the "death of the HDD has been greatly exaggerated"
- its cheap, high volume storage, and all in all "fairly" reliable.

Instead of the fancy electronic gadgetry how about:

Food supply issues
Potable water
Sewage methods
Medical needs

When you get that taken care of then:
Electricity
STD needs
Year round housing
Basic education

Blinky light toys and internet access
are generally pretty far down the priority list IMHO.

When everyone is housed, fed, disease is under control, and
aren't worrying about how you are going to live for the next 24 hours
Then you can start worrying about internet access.

Volunteer for the Peace Corp, Doctors without borders, or similar
and you will get a better idea of whats important.

You have to have a double track system end to end - the San Diego to LA has many places where it is single track. Compounding the problem, much of that track goes though coastal CA along the beach. Nobody wants to improve the track there if its in your backyard.

The Boston to Washington DC rails has a similar problem. They got high speed trains, but a large portion of the tracks do not allow the trains to go at full speed.

Living in San Diego CA we dont really have winter.

More apt to say we got:
Rainy Season
Fire Season
Summer
Sorta Summer
Earthquake Season :-)

Actually radiation hardened designs are only done for older architecture processors in many cases.

The path of a highly energized ion leaves a path thru a semiconductor that remains conductive briefly. Can mess up memory, and logic stuff in a big ugly way.

Wow... A lot of this is missing the main issue that has now limited the speed of processors for a number of years - Limitations of the interconnect.

The average microprocessor is not limited by the capability of the transistor, but rather the RC time constants associated with the connections between them.

Thats the reason, aluminum as a metal interconnect was dropped a while back in favor of copper. Lower R for the same C.

Analog computing? good luck with that!

If you want best signal quality you will have a high gain
dish antenna with an auto alignment system to keep
it aligned with the tower antenna and get the best SNR
performance.

That's going to be a bit bulky and awkward to deal with however.

ALL cell phone antennas are a compromise on usability, compactness
signal strength in transmission, sensitivity to orientation and sensitivity to
close proximity loading (the big sweaty hand syndrome)

And a dozen other things.

The average end user doesn't notice and they don't care until it
affects what they are doing.

Apple Screwed Up - and Jobs doesn't want to show humility.
Old Jobs from 20 years back. Pretty typical for him.

In San Jose, there is a street named for Steve Wozniak (Woz Way downtown)
Nothing there for Steve Jobs.
Woz is well liked by the engineers in Silly Valley - Not so for SJ...

The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817:

        "'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

I see how this could be tracked on EBay - especially "Power Sellers" with 1000's of transactions.
But on CL? that's going to be interesting to see happen.

check out the presently available HP35S -- Still a science & engineering
calculator and not too fancy but very RPN and "Enter" key friendly.

I bought 4 of them in case HP discontinues them.

Double Bad Here -
The engineer breaking company confidentiality was out of line. Getting fired will probably be the outcome.
The "journalist" (such as it is here) revealed a confidential source. That said, they will never get anyone else to talk to them off the record.

Both did the wrong thing.
People on the outside of Apple don't like the "hush hush" way they do product development, but that's part of how Apple functions. If I was getting my paycheck there (and I am not, but friends of mine do!) I would keep that stuff internal as the company wants.

"Loose lips sink ships" - Good thing its not a defense contract, and just a next generation piece of consumer electronic gadgetry.