An article with exactly one image from India's mission, and a slide show of false color images from NASA that most slashdotters think were from MOM.

I expected at least a few more images hinted at by the summary. It will be interesting if they can capture some of the more controversial spots to provide independent confirmation of what NASA has been telling conspiracy buffs for the past few years.

Why should we be excited by a $30 1TGB drive today? 5 years ago I was paying $50 for 2TB drives.

That's my point. Development has slowed on higher capacity platter drives for a number of reasons... our demand as consumers might have slowed, but the "cloud" continues to grow and demand storage, but cloud providers are willing to spend too much for enterprise-grade storage they need. Technology is certainly a stumbling block, but they've been talking about these advances for many years. The main reason for the delays and jacked up pricing was plain and simple greed. The Thai floods were a godsend to the industry, which saw prices plummet below $0.025/GB - and suddenly, they were able to charge 3 times the price for all the drives they had stockpiled (not unlike the Sumitomo explosion back in '94 that drove RAM prices to 5 times their previous prices overnight - when the epoxy resin Sumitomo made was in plentiful stock supplies and never was short)

So platter drive makers have sat back and reaped profits, instead of staying ahead of the SSD price/performance/capacity changes. By 2020, those lines will have crossed. We now see "Enterprise" class SSDs, so capacities WILL continue to rise, even if most consumers only need a 1TB or 2TB drive on their PC. Server farms running only SSDs will be a thing in the future. They may even end up being more durable than platter drives by 2020, and that will make it an easy choice for cloud providers, even if it comes with a slight price premium.

SSDs have far more room for innovation than platter drive technology. There are lots of promising advances making their way to production. Even better... you don't have to shrink the chips and make them more dense - you just have to make the existing fab cheaper. In 6 years, those chips will cost a fraction of what they do today.

As for monitors, 1080p is the result of convergence between the television and the computer monitor. Like it or not, it has resulted in an unprecedented reduction in price. South Korean sellers have already pushed WQHD (2560x1440) monitors to the edge of mainstream, and we'll see 4K mainstreamed in another two years (once the HDMI update gets widely adopted). Video games have been the driving force for computer technologies, and 1080p was a sweet spot, with the latest generation consoles finally able to support it fully and computers managing with even low-end video cards these days.

I have some relatively ancient OCZ Vertex drives that are still running, 24/7 as OS drives for two of my servers (media and an ESXi box). Meanwhile, I have a large stack of platter drives that gave up the ghost with no warning whatsoever.

Reliability is as much a quality issue with SSDs as they are with platter drives, but there is less tolerance, more failure points with a platter drive, due to mechanical action.

By 2020, SSDs will have greater capacities than 20TB.

We are seeing the buggy whip manufacturers in full denial. 10TB drives should have been out a year ago, and consumer 6TB drives should be selling for under $100. The floods in Thailand gave platter drive makers an excuse to keep the prices (and profits) jacked up artificially while the insurance money replaced aging plants with the latest technology.

With a fraction of the energy usage, densities increasing, and hopefully a reversal in the recent trend towards less durability, SSDs will probably also overtake platter drives in price per terabyte within 5 years.

Not crazy about scoping, or should I say, lack of scoping of local variables in ActionScript. If I bracket a chunk of code, and define local variables, they should stop being defined when I exit the scope.

If I define a for statement in C, C++ or C#, I can go: for( int i=0; i10; i++) { something...; } and follow it up by another statement that looks the same.

In ActionScript, the second for loop gets a complaint that I am re-defining a variable.

Over the years of developing C/C++ applications, I had gotten into the pattern of using scoping, particularly in switch statements, to define local variables specific to that block of code.

Now get off my lawn.

So get out, Monsanto, you dirty capitalist pigs!

Seriously, though, this means little. China will use their own knockoff version now and market it, as well.

I'm looking at you, CNET... you used to be cool.

Pretty much any site requiring a "file downloader" is simply evil and should be expunged by or at least blacklisted by browsers. That would help fight 80% of the delivery of malware that I've seen infecting friend's and family's computers.

It's high time we started calling out these "representatives of the people" who are really nothing of the sort. Republican or Democrat, nobody in Washington seems to be concerned for the welfare of the American PEOPLE. They only seem interested in doing whatever the lobbyists who line their pockets tell them to do.

I had a cancerous tumor on my retina.

After treatment, which included radiation (Chip sewn on the lower back part of my eyeball for a week) and lasers, along with the ongoing process of the optic nerve dying from the radiation exposure, I suspect my retina is quite different, and still changing, from 4 years ago when the tumor was treated.

Retinal patterns DO change some times. It's rare, but it happens.

I think it is intended to be "arose from"

...and he's also apparently arguing that, knowing Autonomy is cooking the books, and about to implode, HP thought it would be a great idea to buy them.

Whatever one can say about the competence of HP's board, nobody could seriously claim they'd buy a company if they knew that was going on.

I know they have some large cash reserves, but how long can you bleed $100 million every 4 months?

The Gameboy/DS line is the only thing keeping them afloat, but even that looks to be winding down, bowing to smart phones and tablets.

It's a disease that needs to be stomped out, mercilessly. Allowing the NSA, DHS and CIA (hell, even the IRS, for that matter) to continue to operate as they are allowed to will swallow up the last vestiges of America and its dream.

The dystopia exists now but it's not too late to turn back.