Looking up some datasheets on Kingston's "valueram.com", 2x1GB DDR2 DIMMs use about 1.0-1.4W depending on clock speed. That drops to about 0.8-0.9W for DDR3 modules.

There are lots of discovery stories reported on Slashdot and they always end with, "It will probably be a number of years before it appears on retailer shelves." Well, this story ends the very same way, but this time the amount of rampant speculation in the comments can be kept to a minimum, as here we are "a number of years" later.

I say, more of this sort of thing, Slashdot! It keeps the trolls at bay.

No, it counts as a capacitor.

Aren't we already doing that?

Something tells me that you were not actually in London at the time.

Canon's two latest (Feb. 2009) "TS-E" lenses for 35mm cameras have 3 axes of adjustment.

I tried feeding a bit of a DNA sequence into my Java compiler. I was hoping to run the program and simulate some protein, but all I got was this:

Brain.java:1: 'class' or 'interface' expected
ACTGGACTTACA
^
1 error

What am I doing wrong? Does someone want to check if it works any better with a C compiler? Maybe I need to RTFA again.

It is not necessarily because something "better" comes along. It may be entirely sufficient for something "else" to come along. (Allegedly) teenagers using MySpace discovered that their parents had signed up, so they had to go somewhere else to protect their "privacy" and Facebook became the new darling. Now that their parents have signed up to Facebook, the teenagers are probably on the look-out for something else.

Another thing that mitigates the network effect is that these services are not mutually exclusive. A user and a few friends can sign up to a new service and watch it grow while still maintaining a presence in the old service. Perhaps the user will only post the more incriminating pics of their "private" lives on the new service, so that their parents won't see them. Thus, a new exclusive club is started, but a day will come when it is not exclusive enough and users seeking more "privacy" will move on so they can feel special again.

It is hard to argue with TFA that wrapping a few open standards around photo sharing sites, contact lists, e-mail, etc. might be enough to start a revolution--might. With e-mail, for example, we can have traditional mail applications (MUAs), web-mail, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, etc., but they all work together and users can choose whatever combination they want to do their e-mailing. All it takes is some cleverness and we can have a similar profusion of broadly compatible aggregation applications that perform a similar role to Facebook. We can already see this happening with the way Facebook support is being integrated into, for example, MS Outlook and smartphones.

Sorry, you lost me at the end of the very first sentence. I realise now why you put the word "lay" in quotes. What is a "variance"?

The author finds "some good data on Wikipedia" (respect!) showing that the "lithography size" will be reduced from 32nm in 2010 to 11nm in 2022. He calculates this to be a "volumetric improvement" of 50%. There I was thinking that it was an 846% improvement, but I hadn't taken the third dimension into account.

Nevertheless, I think the author has a point, but he is missing part of the picture: NAND flash SSDs may not replace HDDs any time soon, but other types of non-volatile memory may well do so.

HDD densities will probably increase, but the slow access and transfer times and the static unrecoverable error rate will probably relegate them to use for back-ups or as cheap mass-storage devices for non-critical data. SSDs, however, are not restricted by the limits of NAND flash. Non-volatile memory technologies such spin transfer torque RAM and phase-change RAM have a good chance of replacing NAND flash memory in SSDs. These technologies are available today. Memristors are probably the most exciting development, as they promise a breakthrough in memory density. HP have a memristor-based design that could make petabyte SSDs possible, but we'll probably have to wait a few more years to see if that pans out. There are also major advances being made in fabrication technology, with cheap "printable" electronics already in consumer devices.

Real random-access memory that is cheap, reliable and fast is probably only a few years away from the mass market. There is so much money to be made by such an advance that R&D spending will not be lacking. So, the author is wrong; SSDs will dominate in the near future, just not NAND flash SSDs.

P.S. I don't have any SSDs because they are too small and expensive compared to my 1TB HDDs!

OK, but apart from police services, fire departments, curb-side trash removal, winter snow removal, labor regulation, environmental regulation and judicial services, WHAT HAS THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT EVER DONE FOR US?

The blasphemy law was passed because the constitution prohibits blasphemy and requires that laws be passed to enforce that prohibition. Nothing had been done about this for decades and nobody cared. The government suddenly decided that someone might take a case against them for failure to legislate for blasphemy, so we got this law that was described as being a trivial law to tie up a few constitutional loose ends and sure the fine is only E100,000! Of course, the proper solution would have been to change the constitution, but...well...down with that sort of thing!

All your base are belong to QE2. You are so pwned, innit.

(Excuse: http://xkcd.com/166/)

If you take a look at Kingston's "Alliances" page, you can see that they make memory modules that are sold under other brand names such as "Toshiba". The information is scant, but it sounds like for some Toshiba modules, Toshiba supply the wafer and Kingston chop it up and package it into memory modules that are sold under the Toshiba brand. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Toshiba would sell "Toshiba" modules assembled by Kingston using memory supplied by, say, Samsung.

It all boils down to whether or not you can expect the module to die sooner rather than later and whether or not you'll get your money back if it does. Some brands are better than others in this respect and, yes, "you get what you pay for," most of the time. Who makes the chips and who puts them together is anyone's guess these days. The same product could have different chips from different manufacturers in it depending on the batch. It is not worth worrying about...as long as you keep backups.

1.3MB for the "footer1.png" file! Linus is gonna be pissed when he sees the bill for data on his Google phone.