If you have it in your collection, watch WarGames again.

The opening sequence has a missile operator discussing the quality of the sensemilia his girlfriend was growing with the other. And the bonus easter egg for those of you that do is the sign in the corridor :-)

The suggesting that the numbers would be better if the drives were burnt in is laughable.

Burning in a drive is basically when you connect it up, and run a program to exercise the drive for a set period to make it fail. The idea is that it's better that a drive dies during the burn in process than when in use and theres actual data stored on it. Its a great idea when you want to keep your services availability figures up but won't make the drives themselves any more reliable.

It will however skew the numbers so that drives die much quicker, and will probably have people saying it's now not fair because the drives were pushed to fail.

The ABC have a contact page at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/abctv... where you can ask them why there is no mention of this story on their site - despite the BBC article being shown on national TV in Australia

They have a contact page available at http://www.bletchleypark.org.u... - tell them what you think yourself

I've an HP netbook that I wone as a prize - and some dumb-ass engineer at HP switched the role of the function key and the 'special' functions.

So when you press the [F5] key (good old refresh) the damn thing does a Suspend instead. And then there are all the other weird features it enables that are of no use.

I'm still trying to work out what to fscking do with it - basically it's unusable. About all I can think of is dropping it into a blender and feeding the debris to the fool who thought a non-standard keyboard is a good idea.

It would be interesting to see what patents Google will be picking up with this. It's hard to see US$3.2 billion in value given the limited range of products Nest currently sell, however if there is some latent IP that Google can leverage then there might be some cool stuff coming out of this.

Isn't it strange that there is a group within Microsoft that can turn out such great tools for for languages developed outside, but where they are touting Powershell as a strategic tool you are stuck with a toolset that lives back in the 80s ?

Why can't Microsoft put out a Visual Studio plugin for Powershell with full intellisense, breakpointing, inspections, etc. ?

Sad :-(

... sounds like something from a Dr Who plot line.

If you have ever thought about one of those nice Dell 30" monitors:

Buy two of their 27" screens (about the same price) and enjoy all the extra pixels.

They also overcharge Australian customers,

The only thing they did in response was to modify their online web shop so that Australian customers could only see the AU$ price and conceal the US$ prices out of shame.

:-(

Great documentory on the Russian initiatives for remote operated vehicles - very clever stuff !

I bought a copy of VMware Workstation last year via their online store.

On their site you could choose what currenty to pay in - the conversion to Australian $ added around 40% to the price. What stung was at the time the Australian dollar was stronger than the US$, so in theory the price should have dropped.

I actually phoned up and queried why - the lady at the other end told me that it was due to the exchange rates when they set the price and not the rate at that point in time. However that would only have been the case if they had set the price several years previously.

Now they have fixed the problem by not letting you chose the currency - they force you to pay their inflated Australian prices, even though all you are buying is a license key.

It sure makes those US hosted proxy services look attractive.

It would be really handy to be able to easily identify web sites that are registered with GoDaddy. That way we could politely request that the admins use an alternative registrar.

Have a look at the current pricing for VMware Workstation 7.1

If you pay in US$, they want $189.00

Currently AU$1.00 buys US$1.03 according to the TV, making that approximately AU$183.00

Click on the pull down option on th VMware store to convert the pricing to AU$, it becomes AU$277.00 - a markup of AU$94.00 or approximately 50%.

I've rung and asked them why the difference - and got some bulls**t about there being annual price adjustments based on the current currency conversion. The only problem is the last time that AU$ was low enough for that was back in the 1980's.

US companies regularly rip off Australians.

Many education departments have licensing arrangements and good discount structures with Microsoft.

This is a product that they will be able to order from right out of the catalog, and at better prices than people are talking about here.

There are certainly many cheaper products out there (my favorite right now is the 'ET-STM32 Stamp') but if I was looking to build up an embedded computing curriculum for a school, these gadgets are well worth a look.